Although we have sorely missed opportunities to travel and hear in person about the research of our colleagues from across the world due to the pandemic restrictions, one advantage of the move to online delivery is that much conference presentation material of recent months has been captured as video.

A case in point is the European Conference on Information Literacy 2021 (ECIL2021), hosted by the University of Bamberg in September 2021. The ECIL YouTube channel now holds 113 video-recorded presentations from the conference, including those presented by two Centre for Social Informatics colleagues.

At ECIL2021 Marina Milosheva delivered a paper entitled ‘New information literacy horizons: making the case for career information literacy’. This work was co-authored with her PhD supervisors Professor Hazel Hall and Peter Cruickhank (CSI), and Professor Pete Robertson (of Edinburgh Napier’s School of Applied Sciences). Marina presented an analysis of the extant literature on information literacy and employability in general, and information literacy for the purposes of career development and learning in particular, to argue that ‘career information literacy’ should be incorporated as an additional and separate strand of information literacy scholarship.

Dr David Brazier’s presentation was entitled ‘Information literacy workshops: trials and tribulations of public engagement within a pandemic’. David reported on work completed with CSI colleagues Rachel Salzano and Dr Bruce Ryan on transforming a project built around the delivery of in-person workshops on information literacy and online search best practice in a public library setting so that it could still be completed successfully during the first period of pandemic lockdown in the UK in 2020.

To find out more about the Centre for Social Informatics‘ contributions, please see the recent post by Marina and David on our research group blog.

The next ECIL conference will be held in Kraków, Poland, as indicated in a ‘teaser’ video, also featured on the ECIL YouTube channel.