The Enquiring Minds Project at Staffordshire University: Integrating Information Literacy into the Curriculum and Assessment

Abstract

Alison Pope, Keith Puttick and Geoff Walton have been involved in the information literacy aspects of a project to help students improve their research skills and they report on this and the wider current debates on information literacy with an emphasis throughout on legal research skills.Abstract: At large City firm Herbert Smith, the legal research training programme for trainee solicitors is taken very seriously and includes a compulsory training course in their first two weeks, followed by research exercises and further courses which have been carefully designed in association with the partners to ensure that trainees qualify with excellent legal research skills.

How Can Law Librarians Most Effectively Provide Legal Research Training?

“…Questions 2 and 3 were interested in establishing the extent to which law librarians are familiar with pedagogic and learning theories. A wide range of theories could have been chosen from, but following on from a wide range of research conducted previously (Beljaars, 2009; Callister, 2010; Choolhun, 2012; Fishleigh, 2013; Hunter, 2013; Kim-Prieto, 2011; Pope, Puttick and Walton, 2010; Talley, 2014), it was decided to focus upon the three with most direct application to the work of law librarians in delivering legal research skills training.…”

“…Even though the concept of information literacy has been around for a number of years (Society of College National and University Libraries, 2011), “legal research education has been slow to adopt … (it) as a framework” (Kim-Prieto, 2011, p. 605). Increasingly now, it is being used as a basis for reworking training programmes in universities and law schools (Beljaars, 2009; Harker, 2013; Lawal and Underwood, 2014; Lemmer, 2013; Pope, Puttick and Walton, 2010; Poydras, 2013; Talley, 2014). Much of this work was inspired by the SCONUL 7 Pillars of Information Literacy through a Digital Literacy ‘lens’ (Society of College National and University Libraries, 2013), which took the earlier core model and reworked it to show how it could be applied to digital materials too.…”

New Barristers’ Information Literacy Challenges as They Transition from Education to the Workplace

“…Internationally (Kim-Prieto et al, 2014) and in the UK, the focus has been on law librarians’ roles in teaching IL, often looking at training provisions (Wakefield, 2007; Andretta, 2001; Davies and Jackson, 2005; Pope, 2009; Mawson, 2010; Davies, 2017). Pope unintentionally points towards the tension between academic IL standards and professional IL behaviour, when she highlights that the focus at universities is on preparing students to undertake project work (Pope et al, 2010) like dissertations. However, particularly in the US, academic law librarians, like Poydras (2013) and Desai (2014), have started acknowledging their responsibility to prepare students ‘to actually function in the legal profession’ (Poydras, 2013, p.184).…”