Peter Cruickshank, Dr Bruce Ryan and I recently completed the Information Literacy for Democratic Engagement (IL-DEM) project. This work set out to investigate levels of digital and information literacy within Scotland’s Community Council system. It was supported by a grant from the CILIP Information Literacy Group.
We explored how community councillors develop the skills required to inform and engage with the citizens that they represent, and how libraries support this work. In doing so have extended further two established research streams within the Centre for Social Informatics: (1) Cruickshank and Ryan’s work on digital engagement in local democracy (such as our DigiCC workshops), and (2) mine with Christine Irving on information literacy and life-long learning. This work also builds upon our group’s track record in library and information science research. Continue reading
