Information Literacy: An International State of the Art

B. IL Products for users

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   Advocacy toolkits
   

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   Creation and maintenance of electronic dossiers: Electronic dossiers were introduced in the Universitat de Barcelona in 2000, and offer a platform for communication between teacher and students, as well as a space jointly managed by library and faculty. They include: information on the course program; the recommended bibliography appearing in the student guides for each subject, with a link to the catalogue from each entry; spaces with material presented by the teachers in class; and digitized versions of course-specific material. They are collections of digitized material which can be consulted from any point linked to the network, and thus now play an essential complementary role for many teaching staff. The teacher responsible for each electronic dossier provides the content and communicates with the students via email, discussion forums and chatrooms; the library, for its part, is responsible for the management of the space and for checking the bibliography provided by the teacher and digitizing the most frequently consulted documents.
   

Another higher education institution in Catalonia, the Universitat de Lleida⁵, also employs this system in its library, offering electronic dossiers for many of its courses, notably those in its Area of Health Sciences. We may here cite the work done by Carme Torres i Penella, of the Department of Nursing Studies, and the librarian responsible for Health Sciences, Laura Jové, in offering courses in information search skills and management for first-year students on the degree course in nursing.

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   Creation of thematic guides: These are guides produced by subject librarians in collaboration with the teachers of the relevant subjects. They have a twofold purpose: 1) the systematic location of links to Web resources of interest to each of the subject fields; and 2) the provision of access to the specialized databases and electronic journals available in the library, selecting relevant documents from the library catalogue. This system is used by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), the Universitat de Girona⁶, the Universitat de Barcelona, the Universitat de Lleida, and the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha.
   

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   Teaching Resources Factory (Factoría de Recursos Docentes): This is a resource centre for creating multimedia teaching materials, and a repository for recordings and multimedia material arising from conferences, seminars, etc, organized by university research groups. It is used by the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya [based in Barcelona] and the Universitat de Girona.
   

We may here stress the portal known as MOREA (Múltiples objetos reutilizables para la enseñanza y el aprendizaje - Multiple reusable objects for teaching and learning - URL: http://www.usc.es/morea/), which is essentially a repository of resources for teachers and a platform with guides to assist teachers in the preparation of electronic materials.

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   Coordination of the Proyecto Campus/Aula Global (Global Campus/Classroom Project): This is a platform for communication (services/users, teachers/students) offering support for the new teaching methods. It offers a range of applications related to such areas as access to information, communication, teaching and learning, and administration. Its objective is to offer a useful complement to the in-class teaching/learning process. Among the most interesting projects here are: the Campus Global (CG; Global Campus) of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra; (http://www.upf.es/usice/cg/noucg/cast), the Campus Virtual (Virtual Campus) of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (https://ticeu.uab.es); and support initiatives for in-class teaching such as the Aula Global (Global Classroom), an academic portal of the Universidad Carlos III (Madrid) (http://www.uc3m.es), and the 'subject intranet' ('Intranet de la asignatura') of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. The last-named is a multidisciplinary resource aimed at helping resolve problems related to curricula or academic paths with the intention of encouraging training in and use of library resources. It combines the presentation of teaching materials (local or external) with information and communication systems (Selective Dissemination of Information (SDI), forums, chatrooms), and in addition, self-assessment systems with instant answers, databases allowing students to monitor their own continuous assessment ratings, and virtual spaces for the students themselves, in which they can store their work or share it with their peers.
   

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