Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Vitenamese immigrants; international workshops; Street lighting industry; Open access book on infolit in Portuguese: Sheila blogs from #ecil2017

This morning I presented on behalf of Dr Batool, a former PhD student, in a pecha kucha session at the European Conference on Information Literacy in Saint-Malo, France. I will blog this separately, but are some notes on other presentations in the session (the slide is from the first talk):

Dominant Traits of the Information Behavior of Vietnamese Immigrants in the Czech Republic: Influences on Building Their Information Landscapes – Preliminary Paper from Petra Cernohlavkova (presenter) and Helena Lipková
Vietnamese have migrated for various reasons to many countries, and in the Czech republic they are concentrated particularly in cities. The extent of integration (contact) depends on the age of both Vietnamese and Czechs (e.g. older people mostly encounter in shops as seller/customer). Because incoming Vietnamese may have low literacy and Czech language skills, and need to earn money, they are liable to exploitation. Collective coping strategies are important to them. Vietnamese will use personal networks rather than social media etc. which they have not used in Vietnam (see slide), and they don't use libraries, and distrust services provided for free (as they might have had poor experiences with NGOs). She recommended a closer cooperation between libraries and NGOs to help introduce the Vietnamese to the new information landscape.

Information Literacy for Scientific Organizations: Progress by International Co-operation from Paul Nieuwenhuysen
"Scientific organisations" included, here, universities: the main focus is on international cooperation (between the host country here, Belgium, and other countries). They aim to bring together experts from different (mainly developing) countries. They aim to confront the experts witheach others' views to surface problems, challenges, hopes and expectations. There have been training programmes of a few months, hosted at Belgian universities, with the target group young information professionals mainly from Africa, Asia and Latin America. There are also workshops so far in India and the Philippines. There is some material from the author e.g. here and here

Information Literacy in Portuguese University Context: a Necessary Intervention by Carlos Lopes, Tatiana Sanches (presenter), Maria da Luz Antunes, Isabel Andrade, Julio Alonso Arevalo
They had noted that not everyone had access to the new forms of creation and publishing (so had difficulty building digital identities); also the large flow of information; and the need to adapt to new ways of interacting, knowing and thinking. Library professionals in Portugal had posed themselves the question of how to address these issues. They identified two goals: reaffirming the importance of IL/transversal competencies amongst university colleagues, and the second developing librarian skills. They have responded by developing a book: chapters include an infolit self-evaluation framework, a smmary of existing models, best practice examples, material relatting to intergration of IL in the curriculum, and current and future trends/issues. This is the first open access book on information literacy in Portuguese. The book is at http://repositorio.ispa.pt/handle/10400.12/5067

Information Literacy in Street Lighting Industry: Content curation with Scoop.it by Gilbert Charles Faure
This was characterised as a niche industry with a major global impact. There are tech innovations, but also e.g. environmental concerns. Knowledge management and infolit is rather poor in these companies. Informal communications, product and industry publications etc. are important. Scoop.it is being used here as a curation tool for knowledge management. Content hubs have been created related to the Lighting industry and curated for four years. There can be a watch on technical aspects (e.g. LEDs, solar power) and societal aspects (e.g. light pollution, effect on ecology). The speaker also highlighted the topic of lighting in art - that lighting may be installed as an art work (so serving a dual purpose). He noted that he collaborated with others to share resources, both companies and agencies.

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