London Calling

by Laurie and Alison

LILAC is the Librarians Information Literacy Annual Conference held in the UK. This year's conference was held in London at both the British Library (photo) and at the London School of Economics. There were about 400 attendees (delegates as they are known in the UK) and about 1/4 of us came from abroad -- from over 25 countries. We attended an international delegates reception near the London bridge.

In our presentation, we discussed how our role as academic librarians may be changing with regard to what it means to focus on information literacy in a global world. In this context, we reflected upon the strengths and weaknesses of existing higher education information literacy standards. The implications of considering a shift away from what is largely, in our experience, a skills-based teaching paradigm can have profound implications for our daily work.

We discovered that our colleagues are grappling with many of the same issues we are as regards to challenges librarians face as teachers, the strengths and weaknesses of information literacy standards, mobile technology and collaborating with campus colleagues.

You can visit the conference website at: http://lilacconference.com/WP/