Good practice

Good practice in information handling and data management

Identifying and promoting best practice in information literacy training and development across the HE and research sectors can be a useful way of encouraging institutions to adapt or improve their approach to such activity. It facilitates knowledge sharing and peer-to-peer exchange, and can help to develop communities of practice. But although setting out best practice is a fairly obvious activity to pursue, seeking out and presenting appropriate and relevant instances is not without its challenges. RIDLs has therefore sponsored the identification of examples that cover a useful range of approaches and aspects of IL, as well as a good cross section of institutions.

On behalf of RIDLs – the initiative that preceded and laid the ground for InformAll – teamed up with SCONUL to work on this task, which involved identifying, documenting and presenting around fifteen cases of training good practice particularly from the library sector. This work was undertaken under the auspices of the Research Information Literacy and Digital Scholarship project (RILADS). The final report from that project is here.

The cases that have been evaluated and identified are set out below. The accompanying report, which provides an analysis of the cases, makes use of the criteria developed by RIDLs to describe and assess training provision in information literacy. The report also incorporates recommendations that may be of value to those planning to develop such training resources.

The selected examples are not intended to reflect ‘the best’ IL resource; they are about good practice, rather than best practice, and the benefit of this selection is that those charged with developing resources to serve a similar need may efficiently access some examples – and ultimately perhaps, good practice may become common practice.

[Insert RILADs report]

Examples of good practice