Information Literacy: An International State of the Art

D. Organizations

1. 
   Associations and professional bodies
   

The two main UK groups that focus on information literacy are:

1. 
   SCONUL Working Group on Information Literacy. http://www.sconul.ac.uk/activities/inf_lit/.
   

2. 
   CILIP Community Services Group Information Literacy Group. http://www.cilip.org.uk/specialinterestgroups/bysubject/informationliteracy .
   

Their activities have already been mentioned above.

2. 
   Research centers / Research projects
   

Research into information literacy is being carried out in some information and library departments. Examples are:

1. 
   Robert Gordon University. Information Management Department. Research theme: Information literacy.
   

http://www.rgu.ac.uk/abs/research/page.cfm?pge=5843.

2. 
   University of Sheffield. UK academics' conceptions of, and pedagogy for, information literacy. 3 year project funded by the arts and Humanities Research Council.
   

http://dis.shef.ac.uk/literacy/project/.

3. 
   University College Dublin (School of Information & Library Studies). Information Behaviour Research Group, includes research on Information Literacy.
   

http://www.ucd.ie/sils/index.html.
There are also examples of institutional research. An example of one project involving information literacy is the Learning Support Unit project at University College Dublin (http://www.ucd.ie/lsu/index.html).
Masters students in the UK and Ireland have to produce a dissertation, and this has resulted in many small scale pieces of research. Some of these get reported in the literature or are published on university websites e.g. Weetman (2005). There are also a small, but increasing, numbers of PhD students concentrating on aspects of information literacy.
Some research has been funded by public agencies, for example, JISC funded the Big Blue project (Manchester Metropolitan University Library and Leeds University Library, 2002)