For a week, (January 18-22) HKUST Library hosted a capacity building program as part of the UGC-TDG funded project, Enhancing Information Literacy in Hong Kong Higher Education.  Thirty-eight librarians participated from across the eight UGC-supported institutions in Hong Kong.

 

In a nutshell, "information literacy" is a set of skills, attitudes, and behaviors that allow people to recognize when they want or need information, and then to search, locate, evaluate, manage, and use what they find effectively and ethically.  Information literacy is vital for students to develop into well-informed scholars and citizens (information creators and users) with strong critical thinking skills.

 

We were privileged to have Ms Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe as trainer and facilitator for this program.  In addition to being Professor, University Library and Coordinator for Information Literacy Services and Instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; she is also a founder of the Association of College and Research Libraries' (ACRL) Information Literacy Immersion and is past-president of ACRL.

 

The program was designed to build librarians' capacity to create collaborative partnerships with faculty members and to design effective research assignments for students to help develop their information literacy.  A second 2-day program on assessment will be held in June. These programs are intended to prepare librarians for the later phase of this UGC-TDG project (from July 2016), in which each institution will provide "course enhancement funds" to individual courses to promote faculty-librarian partnerships to embed information literacy elements deeply into the course-work via collaborative partnerships with faculty members.