Information Literacy

I spent a few days in Limerick this week at an EU funded project to promote and deliver information literacy modules to undergraduates in universities in the Western Balkans. There are four EU partners leading on the project and one of these is Middlesex University. Other EU partners are Greece, Ireland & Romania and the universities we are working with are in Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Kosovo and Montenegro.

The American Library Association define Information Literacy as the ability to “recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information” . The skills and competencies required for information literacy are the same as those which are necessary for work on literature review.

We have been evaluating a useful resource developed in Ireland – it’s a self managed tutorial taking you through various stages of information literacy. Please have a look – there is much that is useful for your purposes at the moment. In particular look at Unit 2.5 and see how you can apply this to your own literature review.