Here, we aggregate results from our efforts on identifying extant knowledge in literacies at the workplace.
Systematically collecting and reviewing
A comprehensive literature review was conducted semi-automatically to identify extant knowledge in information literacies at the workplace. Most of the literature was found within the fields of Education, Health and Library and Information Science (LIS). Comparatively fewer articles were found in within the business, management, organization, human resources and wellbeing.
The preliminary literature review results, based on a keywords search strategy, are available on a Google drive folder (access is limited to the project team). By storing our collected articles on Google drive, we benefited from:) 1) accessible storage (in terms of price), 2) automatic backups, accessible3) automatic syncronization across project team members, 4) easy remote access from multiple devices, and 5) the indexing capabilities of Google allow us to rapidly search for textual strings within the article collection content.
The article collection is organized within folders that reflect the adopted keywords search strategy. Duplicated files were identified and merged. Duplicated files may exist in different sub-folders (i.e., articles X may be captured both when searching form articles in 'Information Literacy' and 'Computer literacy'). Such duplicated files do not take extra space (they are 'hard links' -- just an additional name for an already existing file in the operating system).
As articles downloaded from the publishers' websites (mostly in the pdf format) have a very inconsistent naming. Efforts were conducted to rename automatically such articles within the author-year-title-publisher filename format (see the impact tab for more information on the developed software script that attempts to automatically rename a pdf from its meta-data). As others before us, we found out that publishers remain very bad and inconsistent at including relevant meta-data within the articles that they distribute. The filenames (of our article collection) do not contain more than 260 characters for compatibility with Windows and Mac operating systems (Google drive allows filenames that contain more than 11974 characters!) --- in other words: long author names and long titles were shortned. Articles named consistently by author-year-title-publisher are easier to locate across the team members.
In parallel, and to enable an easy and fast citing of articles from our collection, we created a collection of items identified during the litereature review efforts as a RefWorks project collection . Such collection contains many items that were unavailable (i.e., articles from books and journals whose content is not subscribed by our libraries). They were included based on its abstract information only. As most of the project team is located at , it matters to refer that the library of have licenses of RefWorks till Jan 2018, and the instructions on how to use it are available in a dedicated page by the Åbo Akademi University Library (instructions in the Swedish and English languages) .
A number of tools are recommended to better grasp vast collections of academic articles such as ours. Among others, we provide tips on how to search across multiple files and folders on Google drive, Adobe Acrobat Reader and the native search functions of Windows, Mac, and Linux. This should speed the literature search while writing articles.
Tips to search within the article collection (hosted in Google drive)
- Advanced search options to look for files in Google drive The usage of quotes, the OR operand and the Minus sign (-) can be quite handy.
- How to Search for text inside multiple PDF files at once with Adobe Acrobat Reader It allows to search for comments and bookmarks within a pdf document.
- How to set Windows 10 to search within file contents Windows 10 does not fastly search within pdf files by default. Some advanced indexing options need to be configured.
- Advanced searches with the Mac Finder Supports boolean search terms such as Any (OR), All (AND), or None (NOT). You can also save searches for later use.
- How to find all files containing specific text/pattern on Linux? With support for regular expressions (e.g. "litera*" search returns literacy, literacies and literate among other words), the old Unix/Linux grep command is still one of the most efficient ways to search for strings and patterns in text files.
Related literature review articles
While building a vast collection of articles, we soon realized the need to identify the most cited and the most recent reviews articles on the topic.
Using a multitude of strategies, some searching for strings such as "in this review article" within the overall collection, some other relying on search filters from publication databases (e.g., ProQuest and EBSCOhost), we found many literature review articles on the topic. Such articles were then later sorted by the number of citations (google scholar) and publication year. We aimed at capturing both established and recent work. The results are captured in a google docs spreadsheet that ranked review articles both its year and citation count. While reading some of this reviews, other reviews keep being identified.
We were able to identify 103 review articles dealing with the concept of information literacy. Taken into consideration how recent is the review, where it was published, and how often it got cited, we identified and ranked 10 review articles as the most relevant ones for the projects.
Seminal review articles
Ranked by relevance to the project goals:
- Weiner, S. (2011). Information literacy and the workforce: A review. Education Libraries, 34(2), 7-14.
Available: open access; - Stordy, P. (2015). Taxonomy of literacies. Journal of Documentation, 71(3), 456-476.
Available: emeraldinsight; - Bawden, D. (2001). Information and digital literacies: a review of concepts. Journal of documentation, 57(2), 218-259.
Available: emeraldinsight; - Edmunds, A., & Morris, A. (2000). The problem of information overload in business organisations: a review of the literature. International journal of information management, 20(1), 17-28.
Available: sciencedirect; - Tuominen, K., Savolainen, R., & Talja, S. (2005). Information Literacy as a Sociotechnical PracticeThe Library Quarterly, 75(3), 329-345.
Available: jstor; - Saranto, K., & Hovenga, E. J. (2004). Information literacy—what it is about?: Literature review of the concept and the context. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 73(6), 503-513.
Available: sciencedirect; - Bawden, D., & Robinson, L. (2009). The dark side of information: overload, anxiety and other paradoxes and pathologies. Journal of information science, 35(2), 180-191.
Available: open access; - Eisenberg, M. B. (2008). Information literacy: Essential skills for the information age. DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information Technology, 28(2), 39.
Available: open access; - Lloyd, A. (2005). Information literacy: different contexts, different concepts, different truths?. Journal of Librarianship and information Science, 37(2), 82-88.
Available: open access; - Sproles, C., Detmering, R., & Johnson, A. M. (2013). Trends in the literature on library instruction and information literacy, 2001-2010. Reference Services Review, 41(3), 395-412.
Available: emeraldinsight;
The systematic literature review informed forthcoming research actions. Our efforts continues, but now with a better grasp of extant knowledge of information literacies in the workplace.
Links of interest:
- Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) -- Set relevant standards such as the "Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education" and the "Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education". The ACRL Presidential Committee on Information Literacy released on January 10, 1989, in Washington, D.C. a report on the "Importance of Information Literacy to Individuals, Business, and Citizenship" .
- National Forum on Information Literacy -- Initiative from the American Library Association(A.L.A.) on information literacy.
- Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) -- Set a standard in Information literacy skills .
- Library and Information Science Research Coalition (UKL) -- Large scale research program established by the British Library (BL), the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), the Museums Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) and the Research Information Network (RIN).
- CILIP group on Information Literacy -- Supports practitioners and researchers from around the world with an interest in information and digital literacy. Run by information professionals in UK.
- Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) -- Set the Australian and New Zealand Information Literacy Framework: principles, standards and practice. Published within a collection of information literacy standarts.
- Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA) database -- Database of research articles maintained by EBSCO.
- Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) database -- Database of research articles maintained by ProQuest.
- Information Literacy Commons -- A good colection of information literacy articles published under open-access terms.
- UN Literacy Decade (UNLD) (2003 - 2012)
- UNESCO 8 September International Literacy Day
- Obama Administration initiative on digital literacy
- National Information Literacy Awareness Month -- In 2009, President Obama issued a presidential proclamation declaring October, National Information Literacy Awareness Month, calling upon all Americans to recognize that “the ability to seek, find, and decipher information can be applied to countless life decisions, whether financial, medical, educational, or technical…An informed and educated citizenry is essential to the functioning of our modern democratic society.”. After the arrival of Donald J. Trump the official link no longer available at http://whitehouse.gov .
- Digital Literacy Resources at Cornell University
- Information Literacy interactive tutorial at Stanford University
- Microsoft Digital Literacy Curriculum
- The Wikipedia page in Digital literacy
- The Wikipedia page in Information literacy
- This project on researchgate .
