I don’t know when the idea popped into my head. It probably seeped into my subconscious between my second and third gin and tonic with Kevin Seeber when he name-dropped yet another author I had not yet read, or mentioned some journal I wasn’t familiar with. (Yes, we do like to mix our gin with shop talk.)
But I can’t shake it.
I want to read 100 information literacy articles in 100 days. And write (at least) ten blog posts about them.
Why?
Well, why not?
I’ve been an information literacy librarian for five years now. I began my career as an instruction librarian when Lower Columbia College in Longview, Washington hired me in January 2012. And since then, I’ve changed jobs three times, I’ve taught hundreds of one-shot instructions, I’ve taught quarter-long classes for credit, and I’ve answered lots and lots of questions that start with, “Do you work here? Can you help me with my assignment? I need to find some articles…”
In all that time, I’ve never really had a chance to step back and look at what people are writing, saying, thinking, and theorizing about information literacy.
It’s not that I never read articles about information literacy. I do read as much as I can, but I was a community college librarian for four years and I barely had time to breathe, let alone sit and ponder the state of the literature in my field. As a graduate student, I dutifully read the articles assigned by my professors, but it all seemed so abstract then.
It’s one thing to read about information literacy. It’s a whole other thing to actually teach information literacy.
I’m an instruction librarian, so I better approach this with some outcomes, right?
By the end of this (possibly foolish) endeavor, I hope to:
- Identify trends in information literacy instruction and assessment
- Develop counter-arguments to dominant narratives in information literacy theory
- Evaluate and analyze various perspectives on information literacy
So, the first thing I have to do is build my reading list. This is where you come in—if you have any readings to recommend, please send them to me for consideration. E-mail is fine: ztrope / gmail, etc.
What counts as an information literacy article for the purposes of this project? I’m mostly interested in scholarly articles, published whenever (no specific date range, although I want to include a mix of older and contemporary pieces). I will also include some popular articles as well (especially newspaper and magazine articles published in the last year or so about fake news and digital literacy).
I plan to finalize my reading list by Friday, March 10, and start reading the articles on Monday, March 13. A hundred days later is June 20, the summer solstice. We can celebrate the longest day of the year together with one final blog post about my project, written with flowers in my hair, a white candle burning on my desk, and a large glass of pinot grigio (with a few ice cubes) at my side.
Sound good? Let’s go.
Zoe Fisher 