Page 8 - Introduction — Information Literacy and Information Behaviour, Complementary Approaches for Building Capability

8 Mark Hepworth and Geoff Walton

technologies. He advocates that librarians should focus on their impact, that
is enabling others to be creative, through the use of information technology,
rather than their frequency of use of information products and resources.
Christine S. Bruce, Mary M. Somerville, Ian Stoodley, Helen Partridge
emphasise the need to focus on people’s information experience rather than
skills or abstract conceptions of information literacy. They note the diversity
of people’s information experience and the significance of the context within
which people use information. Their chapter emphasises the social, rather
than individualistic, dimension of information literacy, and explores these
ideas in a faith community, in Australia, and also in an ethnic setting in
North America. The use of phrases such as ‘compendiums of local
knowledge’ to refer to, for example, collections of recipes and ‘learning
about life y via participation’ reinforce the collective perspective on the
information experience.
Rosemeire Barbosa Tavares, Sely Maria de Souza Costa and Mark
Hepworth place information literacy in the community context and the value
of taking participative approaches to both explore and enable people to
develop abilities and a consciousness of their own information literacy needs.
This chapter describes an intervention in Brasilia where people in the
community, through facilitation, explore collaboratively social issues and
how information could help to address these issues. At the same time the
authors make the connection between a collaborative, participative approach
and the development of citizenship, civil rights and empowerment.

1.5. Conclusion

The following diagram (Figure 1), developed in collaboration with Fatmah
Almehmadi a Ph.D. student at the Centre for Information Management at
Loughborough University, who is studying women researcher’s information
behaviour in Saudi Arabia, helps to highlight and summarise the distinctions
between IB and IL research. It can be seen that there are similarities. We
would argue that they are complementary. To put this more forcibly to
ensure that information literacy interventions relate to the needs and
experience of the trainee, it is recommended that trainers should spend time
understanding the information experience of the audience in same way as an
IB researcher would, for example, conducting a study of current information
seeking and needs, barriers etc. From a pragmatic perspective this should be
seen as needs analysis or a form of diagnostics that helps to inform teaching
and learning interventions or to develop theoretical approaches.
Conversely, it could be argued that IB researchers should incorporate
more explicitly an understanding of the respondents’ information literacy