MJ’s blog

Last week I presented a session at the Atlantic Provinces Library Association (APLA) conference entitled, “Information Literacy in the Age of YouTube.” Basically, I looked at the impact of images (and moving images) on library notions of information literacy.

I argued that we need to pay attention to images (and other visual information) for two main reasons: 1) images tell stories, and 2) stories help us understand our world.  While there are many new “literacies” or “fluencies” in this new Information Age (media literacy, digital literacy, screen literacy, visual literacy, etc.), I believe that the library notion of information literacy is still the most robust concept to deal with our increasingly diverse information environment.

The problem we face isn’t with the definitions–or standards, or competencies–related to information literacy; the problem is that we librarians tend to equate “information” with text. If something isn’t published by a reputable publisher, or frozen in the pages of a book, we seem uninterested. This might have been a perfectly logical approach in the past, but it’s no longer tenable. We need to rethink our notions of information literacy to include other media.

You can check out a PDF handout of my slides here (10mb), download a PPT version here (but my pretty fonts might not translate), or watch the SlideShare embed below (again, fonts didn’t translate perfectly – boo!).

Just a note: these slides may not make much sense without me talking over them, so if you’re interested in reading the script that I (loosely) followed it’s here. Hopefully, that will help. Enjoy.