This study focuses on Mexican university students and their perceptions about their information literacy (IL) related practices as they face the persistent challenge of digital disinformation. The analysis highlights deficiencies in essential critical information competencies and the lack of pedagogical action within higher education with respect to the integration of IL into the curriculum. Following a qualitative approach, the research collected feedback from students who participated in a short instructional intervention. All the findings point to a strong tendency to draw on ‘digital intuition’ as opposed to a defined set of criteria and limited tools to corroborate information. The results argue that IL is essential for informed and responsible actions and should be integrated horizontally in all components of the curriculum. In the context of digital disinformation, the paper concludes with suggestions for using sustainable methods to teach IL in the form of IL integration into educational programmes.
This project report looks at the pedagogic identity of health librarians in the UK, predominantly National Health Service staff, and related challenges they face. Through an online workshop and a follow-up survey, the authors investigated how health librarians perceive themselves as teachers, the challenges they face when teaching healthcare staff, and what support they need. The findings reveal a multifaceted identity, with ‘trainer’ being the most common descriptor, followed by ‘facilitator’, with ‘teacher’ being the least common descriptor, though many librarians selected multiple identities. Key challenges faced were time, technology, practicalities, skills, and engagement. The study highlights the need for more professional development opportunities focused on pedagogic skills, particularly around confidence-building, teaching critical appraisal and statistics, and creating engaging learning environments.
Disinformation, amplified on digital platforms, disproportionately impacts young people and those oppressed by their gender identity, who end up being more vulnerable to the phenomenon. Given this context and based on the perceptions of young people living in Salvador (Bahia) and Porto Alegre (Rio Grande do Sul), two Brazilian capitals, this article aims to investigate the relationship between disinformation and gender. This is a basic study with a qualitative approach and exploratory intent. A bibliographical study was conducted covering the period 2016 to 2025 in the main database of Information Science in Brazil (BRAPCI), and empirical research data collected from young people from both cities was analysed. The results highlight hate speech as the most cited problem among young people, with a higher prevalence among girls and non-binary individuals. There is also variation in the intensity of self-reported impacts, with boys reporting milder impacts, followed by girls and, finally, non-binary people, who report more severe impacts. The findings reinforce the importance of promoting information literacy (IL) and media education in Brazil.
As academic libraries approach the limits of what can be achieved through single class sessions and individual student consultations, innovative strategies are needed to deepen and sustain library integration in course curriculum. This project report explores one academic library’s use of librarian-led faculty development programming to extend instructional impact and increase engagement with library resources. Drawing on participant feedback, the authors highlight how collaborative assignment design offers a strategic and scalable approach to achieving teaching and learning priorities. The findings underscore the value of library-led faculty development, the role of financial incentives in motivating faculty participation, and a strong interest among instructors for increasing engagement with librarians.
Purpose To examine how academic librarians in Indonesia design online information literacy (IL) instructional media, focusing on their design workflows, the competencies they draw on, and the contextual constraints they navigate when integrating instruction and technology in post-pandemic digital environments. Design/methodology/approach This qualitative descriptive study used an asynchronous qualitative instrument with purposive, criteria-based sampling (academic librarians with ≥1 year of experience who had created online IL media within the past two years). Eighteen librarians from multiple regions participated. Respondents provided narrative accounts and shared examples of their online IL media; follow-up clarifications were conducted via email and WhatsApp. Data were analysed using qualitative content analysis and organised through Guided Inquiry Design (GID) as the primary analytic lens. Findings Librarians describe a recurring workflow that enacts GID as a production-centric loop rather than a fully balanced, sequential cycle. All GID phases are present, but work clusters heavily in Gather-Create-Share (media production and dissemination), while Open/Immerse, Explore/Identify, and Evaluate are compressed, informal, and often under-documented. A phase-structured competency ecosystem underpins this loop, with competencies distributed across phases: instructional awareness and user-needs sensing; media and interaction design; information architecture and copywriting; platform operations; and basic analytics, supported by cross-cutting soft skills. These patterns are shaped by structural pressures, including limited time and staffing, multiple role responsibilities, uneven infrastructures, and visibility demands driven by social media metrics, which collectively push librarians toward rapid, output-focused workflows and lightweight, engagement-based evaluation. Practical implications The study suggests practical levers for strengthening online IL media design in academic libraries, including lightweight planning tools aligned with GID phases, targeted micro-trainings in instructional and evaluative design, simple enhancements to evaluation (e.g. brief checks, user polls, and feedback prompts), cross-functional collaboration, and the development of reusable digital assets. The proposed model can serve as a diagnostic tool for libraries to reflect on where competencies and resources are concentrated and where planning or evaluation phases may need reinforcement. Originality/value This study provides one of the first qualitative accounts of online IL media design from Indonesian academic librarians and extends the IL and GID literature by theorising a production-centric adaptation of GID, articulating a phase-structured competency ecosystem, and framing the contextual constraints of IL media work as structural pressures. It offers a context-sensitive explanation of how inquiry-based instructional frameworks are operationalised in resource-variable academic library environments in Southeast Asia. Limitations The study draws on a small purposive sample and self-reported accounts supplemented by artefacts, without direct observation or student outcome measures. Future research should incorporate ethnographic or longitudinal data, learner analytics or assessments, and broader or comparative samples to examine the transferability and boundary conditions of the production-centric GID loop in other institutional and regional contexts.
For many years, information literacy frameworks have encouraged students to evaluate the quality of the material within the sources they access. Much less thought has been given to helping learners at the end of a school assignment to identify the benefits to their project that emerged when they drew upon their selected information. This report presents a two-year study in which two different Sixth Form groups were introduced to two models devised for this purpose. Each was based on well established ideas developed by experts in information behaviour. Many of the students, all of whom were candidates pursuing the Extended Project Qualification, made imaginative use of the models, which proved invaluable in enabling them to satisfy the course’s assessment objective relating to the exploitation of resources. The second framework, derived from research by Dervin and Reinhard, was received particularly enthusiastically, probably because the elements are more easily arranged in a chronological sequence, so enabling the learner to reconstruct the “story” of their research experience. It is, however, difficult to reach unequivocal conclusions about student preferences as each of the two groups was introduced to only one of the two models and the candidates did not have to choose between them.
This report describes an intervention that required students to submit a structured log demonstrating engagement with the literature alongside a required report to strengthen information literacy, reinforce argumentation skills and limit the ease of misuse of generative AI. The intervention was deployed in a class of 120 interdisciplinary MSc students in the environmental sciences. It required students to (1) examine how citations function in argument, (2) practice source evaluation using a stepwise protocol, and (3) submit a supplemental citation log. Supporting instructional materials addressed the conceptual foundations of citation as argument infrastructure, introduced a tiered model of justification for research decisions, and provided classroom exercises to build relevant skills. All student groups produced citation logs that demonstrated engagement with source material, though most submissions contained minor formatting and file-handling inconsistencies that impeded automated validation. Instructors observed that this requirement did not pose unusual difficulty and open student evaluation comments did not single out the new expectations. The pilot suggests that these additions are workable, that they make students’ engagement with the literature more transparent and that they may constrain casual misuse of generative AI. Looking forward, clearer instructions and in-class guidance will be needed to reduce avoidable submission errors and support efficient assessment.
Knowledge work is comprised of specialists who collaborate by exchanging expertise and skills to produce products and services; this is exactly what happens in open-source software development communities, albeit in a virtual and globally distributed manner. In this study, we examine two large and well-known open-source communities, specifically OpenStack and Automotive Grade Linux. More specifically, we take the theoretical notion of information literacy (IL) practice to analyse the day-to-day information-intensive activities of those communities. We collect and analyse naturally occurring publicly available digital trace data derived from the projects from an IL perspective. We report a set of ten information-intensive activities that are presented to an audience interested in IL and digital work, but not necessarily in software development. These ten activities are branching, committing, fetching, pushing, merging, reviewing, continuously integrating, gating, release management, and announcing — that collectively constitute the developers' information practice. While most of the reported information activities cannot be carried out in non-digital environments, the increasing trend towards the digitalisation of work reiterates the importance of studying the production and knowledge management practices in digital work.
This study explores information literacy within a community organized around contested beliefs, challenging the assumption that information literacy reduces susceptibility to misinformation. It assumes a sociocultural perspective on information literacy, conceptualising information literacy practices as shaped by and taking place within intersubjectively created information landscapes imbued with values, beliefs, and practices that determine what is considered appropriate engagement with information. Employing reflexive thematic analysis to qualitatively analyse social media content (text and images) published by a Swedish network of nurses active in the COVID-19 dissent milieu, the study finds that critical engagement with information is central for shaping the network’s information landscape. The types of interrogative questions often found in guides or frameworks for critical thinking and source criticism are shown to be part of how information is approached and evaluated within the landscape. Furthermore, within the network’s information landscape, critical thinking is expressed as a moral good and is encouraged both as an approach to truth and as a morally good act. Following this, the study suggests that in this information landscape, belief in contested knowledge may be an effect of information literacy practices rather than a lack of them. The study contributes to the discussion on the role of information literacy as a solution for misinformation belief, showing how IL practices can function to sustain, rather than diminish, belief in contested knowledge.
School Libraries Supporting Literacy and Wellbeing (Merga, 2022) offers a timely and persuasive examination of the contribution of school library professionals to students' literacy development and holistic wellbeing. At a point when schools are navigating heightened accountability pressures alongside growing concern for young people's mental health, the text positions the school library as both pedagogical partner and pastoral space. This book will be of clear interest to practitioners, school leaders and researchers concerned with evidence-informed library practice.
In recent years library staff in the College of Health Science and Society (CHSS) at UWE Bristol have noticed growing demand from students, researchers, and academic staff for support with systematic reviews (SRs). This reflective piece outlines our experiences of how non-health librarians, with no formal SRs training, have met the challenge of supporting our users with SRs. We will focus on the actions we have taken to improve our knowledge and confidence, the challenges we have faced, and we will make recommendations for future career development in this field.
The BRIDGE project (Information and Digital Literacy at School: A Bridge to Support Critical Thinking and Equality Values for Primary Education Using Children’s Literature and Transmedia) addresses the urgent need for structured information and digital literacy education in primary schools. In an era of increasing dis/misinformation, polarisation, and threats to democratic values, young learners are particularly vulnerable to manipulative online content, hate speech and algorithm-driven bias. Despite the recognised importance of critical literacy skills, primary education curricula across Europe exhibit significant gaps in embedding information, digital, and media literacy in a way that is pedagogically sound and transferable across diverse educational contexts. Since the COVID-19 pandemic these challenges have been further exacerbated, accelerating digitalisation while exposing the digital divide. In response, the BRIDGE project (developed through a transnational Erasmus+ KA2 partnership across six countries: Spain, Turkey, Italy, Finland, Greece, and the United Kingdom) proposes an innovative framework to embed information and digital literacy within the primary education curriculum through children’s literature and transmedia, and dialogic reading strategies. This article presents the project’s conceptual framework and the diagnosis on the strategies developed in the project countries in order to promote information and digital literacy in primary education, together with the project’s practical outcomes (open access portal and training suggestions), emphasising its relevance for primary educators, school librarians, and policymakers. The BRIDGE project intends to contribute to both academic discourse and practical education reform, offering evidence-based recommendations for integrating information and digital literacy into primary education. For school librarians, the project provides tools to reposition libraries as active learning spaces, encouraging ethical information use and digital resilience in young learners. BRIDGE may serve as a model for addressing contemporary socio-political challenges, helping future citizens navigate and critically engage with an increasingly complex information landscape.
Teaching is integral to the mission and purpose of academic libraries, but in our institutions and professional organisations, the story of our teaching is often reduced to numbers: How many sessions? How many hours? How many students? Within this framework, quantity dictates success, with more classes, time, and students meaning more impact. Yet as teaching librarians, we know that the story of our work doesn’t begin and end in the classroom. This project report outlines the development of a qualitative, reflection-based evaluative process and toolkit for our Libraries’ instruction programme that centres two critical domains: teacher-librarian self-efficacy and student learning. The implementation of both process and toolkit provides readers a model for examining how well their values align with their own instruction assessment and how to evaluate their teaching programmes in more meaningful ways.
Teaching librarians are regularly tasked with assessing their teaching output and aligning their student learning outcomes to frameworks. Whilst this has been explored extensively in libraries where teams of teaching librarians work together, there has been little exploration for how to assess separate teams working towards the same goals. Previous studies have also mapped teaching against widely used frameworks instead of bespoke institutional information literacy (IL) frameworks. This article outlines how a group of faculty and departmental libraries mapped their teaching to a bespoke IL framework for higher education students. Through doing so, it created a shared understanding of the four competencies included in the framework and identified information practices. These practices were then developed into performance indicators for teaching across libraries and a system was devised for scoring the intensity of the teaching. A set of curriculum matrices and heatmaps were used to explore the scope of teaching delivered and to ensure parity across all student groups. Three core matrices are identified to assess if students receive introductory and advanced tuition across all of the IL framework. The study recommends that curriculum mapping starts with a new interpretation of IL frameworks and that mapping exercises consider how data will be presented during the design stage.
This study examines a gap in Library and Information Science (LIS) education in the Philippines: the limited integration of practical, community-based learning within traditional Information Literacy (IL) courses. Conventional IL instruction often falls short in fostering the critical thinking, civic engagement, and real-world application of knowledge essential for future information professionals. To address this gap, the research investigates the incorporation of service-learning (SL) into an undergraduate IL course within an LIS program and explores how it can effectively enhance IL instruction. The existing IL course was revised to include key SL components: academic integration, meaningful service, and structured reflection and 12 undergraduate students from a Philippine university participated in the redesigned course. Qualitative data, gathered through small group discussions and reflective journals, were thematically analysed, revealing significant student learning outcomes in academic, civic, and personal domains. Results indicate that SL significantly enriches the LIS IL course by enhancing critical thinking, encouraging reflective learning, and preparing students for socially responsible roles. This approach offers a powerful pedagogical model for LIS educators, moving beyond traditional methods to cultivate holistic student development and bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application. The study highlights the real-world impact of SL in equipping LIS graduates to address complex information needs within communities, underscoring the need for further research into its broader applicability and long-term effects on LIS education.
