Page 7 - Introduction — Information Literacy and Information Behaviour, Complementary Approaches for Building Capability

Introduction 7

1.3. Section 3: The Link between University and Work

Vicki Lawal, Christine Stilwell, Rosemary Kuhn and Peter G. Underwood
examine the gap between the legal education system and the practice of law
in the workplace in South Africa and Nigeria. In so doing they aim to
detect the nature and transferability of graduate skills to the workplace
and the role of cross-collaboration between law academics, the practising
bar and academic librarians in the process. They show that, especially in
the light of the growing importance of electronic information as a legal
resource, there is a pressing need to close this gap by restructuring the
legal education curricula by using information literacy pedagogies. They
coin the term ‘legal information literacy’ as a specific subset and brand of
information literacy.
Heidi Julien, Brian Detlor and Alexander Serenko examine information
literacy instruction in business schools in three Canadian Universities, and
their data reveal convincing results regarding the positive effects of the
specific pedagogical intervention of active learning. They demonstrate that
fully integrated information literacy instruction is the most effective
intervention and this is best realised when the collaborative relationships
between librarians, administrators and academics are frequent, strong and
persistent (echoing Julien et al. and Lawal et al.). They also sound a note of
caution and highlight that the value of information literacy skills for the
world of work is not readily recognised by students and this needs to be
made more explicit in order to persuade them.
Evans Wema, from Tanzania, describes the design, implementation and
critically reflects on an information literacy intervention in Tanzania. The
latter highlights some of the challenges associated with the workshops,
including gaining high-level support, and those posed by the technological
infrastructure. This chapter emphasises again the need for contextualisation
and ensuring, for example, that training builds on previous knowledge, is
relevant and enables people to achieve their own and their organisational
goals. The people involved included academics and outreach staff working
in agriculture and also health domain.

1.4. Section 4: Beyond Higher Education

Stephen Abram provides an interesting perspective on information literacy
and the role of librarians. He focuses, in particular, on the need for
librarians to enable people to make use of technology and, in particular,
social media and the ability to access information to achieve organisational
goals. He emphasises the need for librarians to help people navigate and be
critical and strategic in their use of new collaborative information