Chapter 13

Workplace Information Literacy:

It’s Different

Stephen Abram

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to frame the key issues in workplaceinformation literacy. This chapter is the personal experiences andobservations of the author with over 30 years of experience inintranets, corporate libraries and product development. The work-place is not a single or uniform population, as can be said broadlyabout mass markets like consumers, K-12 students, or undergraduatescholars. Workplaces are defined as the workers in both not-for-profitand for-profit sectors who are tasked with running the organizationand delivering services to end users like learners, customers, clients,patients, etc. This chapter explores these issues and frameworksthrough key target audiences in commercial and institutional work-place environments such as:

� Teachers (as opposed to students)� Faculty (professors as opposed to young scholars)� Corporate administrators and business decision-makers, executive,professionals, consultants, accountants, auditors, MBAs, managers� Medical professionals such as doctors, nurses, pharmacists� Lawyers (in both private practice and internal corporate andgovernment work)

Developing People’s Information Capabilities: Fostering Information Literacy in Educational,

Workplace and Community Contexts

Library and Information Science, Volume 8, 205–222

Copyright r 2013 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 1876-0562/doi:10.1108/S1876-0562(2013)0000008017

206 Stephen Abram

� Engineers� Creative professions (artists, advertisers, marketers, etc.)

Keywords: Workplace literacy; information literacy; workenvironments; employment literacy; professional literacy

With workplace audiences there are key differentiations from the morecommon focus of librarians on the broad information literacy needs of enduser populations in public library, school, college and university sectors.These key differences are as follows:

� There is a wider range of and need for partnerships with other stakeholdergroups in the host organization such as human resources professionals,training departments, executive champions, quality leaders, financialleaders.� There are stronger and more clearly defined strategic goals that aremanaged, targeted and measured, such as improvements in productivity,efficiency and effectiveness, revenue growth, cost control, process andtechnological change, etc. that are built into position performancecontracts and compensation. There may also be cultural and environ-mental issues related to unionization.� There are key measurements that predominate decision-making in thissector that include return on investment, return on effort, revenue growth/cost savings, and strategic alignment with long-term and operational goals.� There are strong institutional and cultural considerations around how‘things are done here’ and alignment with the cultural and learning valuesof the dominant profession or industry and commercial norms.� There are often strong differences between public sector and private sectorvalue systems and the articulation of benefits. Communication of these inthe language of the workplace audience is key.� The work product tends to be ongoing and has an arc that transcends theproject and covers years as opposed to the work of students, for example,that tends to have a defined beginning and end and a specific deliverable;while teamwork may be present in some projects, the commercialenvironment has teamwork as the norm.� Lastly, the training and development opportunities provided by anemployer may not be by choice or voluntary, alternatively not all targetaudiences choose to attend, engage, learn or adopt.

The chapter concludes with recommendations for successful framing ofinformation literacy interventions in a workplace context.

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I take the broader view of information literacy and subscribe to theemerging discussion about ‘transliteracy’. I believe that these skills will beessential in the 21st century.

Here’s the definition of transliteracy from Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteracy]:

‘Transliteracy is the ability to read, write and interact across a range ofplatforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print,TV, radio and film, to digital social networks. The modern meaning of theterm combines literacywith the prefix trans-, which means ‘‘across; through’’,so a transliterate person is one who is literate across multiple media’.

Transliteracy can comprise any and all of the following skills andcompetencies in an enterprise environment:

� Reading literacy� Numeracy� Critical literacy� Learning system and collaboration literacy� Social literacy� Search literacy� Computer literacy� Intranet literacy� Web literacy� Content literacy� Written literacy� Mobile literacy� News literacy� Technology literacy� Information literacy� Media literacy� Adaptive literacy� Research literacy� Academic literacy� Confidentiality, privacy, corporate policy� Legal and regulatory literacy� Reputation management, etc.� Cultural literacy (i.e. corporate culture or global initiatives)

In the workplace each of these must be viewed in the context of theenterprise mission, as opposed to a community, learning or societal researchgoal. That difference is the key to understanding the key challenge offocusing on workplace literacy.

This definition nicely frames the challenge of workplace literacy wherethe ability to search, retrieve and use information is rarely sufficient to be

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a competent and successful employee. Success in the workplace requirespeople to be able to integrate specific software, network environments,collaboration tools, learning tools, multiple content formats and more. Andit’s incumbent on both the employer and the employee to keep up to datewith the changes in the technical and content environment as well as theirprofession, sector and industry. The need for continuous learning is morethan just a personal value; it’s a matter of competitive advantage andsurvival. Sometimes lives depend on progress being made and adaptationsspreading throughout the enterprise.

13.1. Collaboration as a Principle in Institutional and Corporate

Environments

One of the great stereotypical myths of our society is that of the solitarygenius that invents or creates something out of the ether. It is a myth. Wehuman beings are social animals. We point to such geniuses as AmadeusMozart who created brilliant symphonies but it would have been all fornaught without the teamwork of the orchestra (and by extension the operahouses and symphony halls and the modern broadcast, technology, andrecording industries that keep the music alive). We can point to ErnestHemingway and Margaret Atwood as great authors but without editors,publishers, researchers, retailers, reviewers, teachers, critics and readers theirworks would be akin to trees falling in a forest with no one there. StephenHawking is perhaps the most verifiable living genius and yet his magnificentintelligence is trapped in a body wracked by disease and atrophy. Withoutthe talents and skills of his collaborators, publishers, university, family andcaregivers, we would know nothing of his insights and lose the humanpotential he exemplifies. Individual genius is not a myth but invention insolitude is. We not only stand on the shoulders of those who’ve gone beforeus, we depend for success on the support and collaboration of talents andteams that expand our own capability. And it almost (just almost) goeswithout saying that libraries and librarians play a huge role in conservingand providing access to recorded knowledge — the proverbial shoulders ofthose who’ve gone before us.

As information professionals who work in environments where wesupport the special needs of work teams, businesses and institutions, we arewell advised to focus on the relationships we need to work with people overtheir longitudinal projects and enterprise goals. We are also challenged byconnecting with these work teams and individuals as we try to connectthrough and to their social networks. Many, and probably most of ourclients, have many networks that extend beyond the organization’s

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boundaries. These networks have both strong and weak ties. By connectingto our clients’ networks, we connect to the ethos of their collaborativeefforts. At our best, we become part of the team and network. Again, we arechallenged by how these networks are changing in recent years with theadvent of enterprise intranets, expertise networks, social networks likeFacebook or business networks like LinkedIn. We ignore these changes atour peril.

In order to make information literacy advances in the workplace wemust connect to these networks, manage communication through themand ensure that we harness the power of these networks to train the trainerand ensure that word-of-mouth succeeds in transferring the important andcritical skills for success in our organizations.

Many of our interactions as information professionals, and indeed agreat deal of our true impact, involves tending and nurturing thedevelopment of broad information literacy competencies that lead tosuccessful collaboration, project success, innovation, insight and creativity.This fact can often be lost in traditional library strategies that overly focuson statistics about deliverables and effort (like website hits, referencequeries, meetings, etc.) and counting these transactions. These too often takea blinkered view of just one small section of the client’s experience andignores the real and measurable impact on the success of the organizationand the individuals therein. Transformational librarianship is far moreabout relationships than the statistics that emphasize transactionallibrarianship. It focuses on workflow and the ultimate desired results ratherthan the transaction. Social institutions like businesses, associations,academe, government and, indeed, libraries are an aggregation of individualeffort but keeping score on individual transactions devalues the ultimatevalue in collaboration. One plus one can equal three! Recognizing that oursociety, and indeed all societies, since time immemorial are comprised of adiversity of individuals interdependent on each other for survival andprogress is essential to frame the goal of making progress as enterprises andas a society.

So, let’s consider the points of intersection between informationprofessionals and our clients, teams and groups, the value we deliver, andthe impact we have in a transformational context.

13.1.1. A Few Definitions

Simply collaboration is, ‘‘The action of working with someone to produce orcreate something’’. More specifically, Collaboration is working together toachieve a goal. It is a recursive process where two or more people ororganizations work together to realize shared goals, this is more than

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the intersection of common goals seen in co-operative ventures, but a deep,collective, determination to reach an identical objective for example, anintriguing endeavor that is creative in nature by sharing knowledge, learningand building consensus. Most collaboration requires leadership, althoughthe form of leadership can be social within a decentralized and egalitariangroup. In particular, teams that work collaboratively can obtain greaterresources, recognition and reward when facing competition for finiteresources’’. [Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaboration]

Cooperation is the, ‘‘act or instance of working or acting together for acommon purpose or benefit; joint action, the more or less active assistancefrom a person, organization, etc., a willingness to cooperate in activities forshared for mutual benefit’’. [Dictionary.com]

Teamwork is the, ‘‘cooperative or coordinated effort on the part of agroup of persons acting together as a team or in the interests of a commoncause’’. [Dictionary.com]

Social is an adjective meaning of or relating to society or its organization.Libraries are social institutions. So are governments, schools, colleges,

businesses, churches and indeed nearly any human enterprise — formallyorganized or not. Social life is the basic way we humans achieve things.Therefore the social technology tools represent huge opportunities for socialprofessions.

13.1.2. Framing the Conversation

There have been some pressures on the context of social collaboration in thepast few decades. Disruptive innovations in technology have takentechnology from a mechanical retrieval and workflow context to one that issocially aligned with human needs and behaviours in a societal context. Thishas become more important as we experience the real emergence of a globalinformation and knowledge-based economy. This has resulted in pressureson social institutions to reimagine the ways their people — employees,learners, inventors, customers, etc. — interact, live, work and play.

With the emerging alignment of collaboration technologies with the goalsof society, human engagement and work, librarians must evolve along withthese technologies and prepare for a world where we can enlarge our impacton client and organizational success with less focus on the face-to-face andphysical colocation. This ironically might move us back in time to wherelibrarianship had a greater focus on relationships and professional serviceand less on accessing information using technology and digital content.Rising above the stressors and disruptors that are affecting some of ourprofessional foundations — access, content, resources, packaging — andrenewing our emphasis on improving our users in their context can serve to

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be a key building block for increasing our value, sustaining our success, andsurviving and thriving.

13.1.3. Technologies

Technology is, in and of itself, neutral. However, when humans engage withtechnologies, then the world gets messy. All of us can point to instances andevents of content spam, digital junk, cyber-bullying, online fraud, spam,phishing, loss of privacy and identity theft that have been facilitated by newtechnology on scales that were not possible in the old paradigm. We can alsopoint to the role that social technologies and digital content have played inincreasing invention and discovery, making hidden content visible, reunitingfamilies, Arab Spring and democracy movements, along with the WikiLeaksgovernment transparency movement. On a more pedestrian basis the socialweb has increased access to both good and bad information, increased and/or changed our perceptions of other people and cultures, and connectedpeople, teams and classrooms on a scale that was unimaginable even a fewyears ago.

While we often discuss knowledge management as a technologicalintervention in organizations, we know that one can’t manage actualknowledge since that can only exist in the human mind. We can manage theknowledge ecology and recorded knowledge is merely information until itenters the minds of decision-makers and learners. We can perform theinterventions of training, development, technology and culture that moveorganizations forward towards their goals.

Our organizations are deeply challenged to balance access to people,information and recorded knowledge with the need to protect privacy andcorporate secrets, all while sharing safely. Mining the power of socialtechnologies and digital content is a minefield requiring teams ofprofessionals including us. We can’t prepare our organizations for a futurewhere employees, customers, users, researchers, partners and learners areconnected at exponentially higher rates by banning or over-controllingaccess without damaging our own organization’s potential for success. Atthis point in history, we struggle with finding the appropriate balance andthat balance will be different for different organizational and industrialcontexts. What is right for consumer agencies might not apply to medicalrecords, public versus private sector, might not be best for militaryintelligence versus food safety companies. If this was easy, it wouldn’trequire information professionals!

The potential and emerging proofs that the social web and collaborationtools improve work environments, increase learning and mitigate thedisadvantageous effects of ability differences, necessitates that we focus on

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continuing our approach of using pilots, prudent risk, and trial and error toexplore the potential of these environments to improve expertise network-ing, knowledge sharing, learning and alignment with organization goals. Ifthere’s anything that’s clear, social and collaborative, technologies will playan even larger role in every aspect of our work and personal lives.

I believe that it’s clear that those organizations that choose to ignore this,or not engage, are choosing to damage their own progress, relevance andsuccess. Since we are always set in the present, we are being challengedto learn and teach the techno-enhanced social collaboration and learningskills with the emerging puzzle pieces of the future ecosystem. I suspect thatmost of the current crop of tools and environments will either not exist by2025 or will have changed radically by that date. That’s OK. They representthe features and functions of an emerging ecosystem of collaborativelearning, work and play that is assembling itself on the fly. The skills are thesocial skills we’ve always known. Many of us have traversed through amelange of social environments in the past few decades such as Lotus Notes,SharePoint and Yammer. All gave glimpses into a great deal of potential,and from most of our experiences, left a lot of room for improvement. Thechange is in the scale, price and the patina of risk each tool carries with it. Thebiggest challenge has been in moving organizational cultures to one wheretechnologically enhanced sharing and collaboration are adopted as a culturalnorm, and where coding and storing data associated with the transactionsthat underpin the success of the organization. What are the major puzzlepieces and how have they changed? How do we influence cultural change?

Many of us in the information profession participate in the success ofour intranet, learning and website environments. Over the next few yearsI predict that these environments will start to look less and less liketraditional websites and more and more like the social networks that arebecoming the norm for the digital and mobile experience. Developingdigitally enhanced collaborative experiences and creating ‘experienceportals’ beyond our current information portals will underpin greaterenterprise success. Currently an information portal merely provides accessto information objects (like articles, books, websites, etc.) that can becounted whereas an experience portal creates an experience that can have ameasurable, positive impact on key organizational decisions. For example,does it increase sales success or learner engagement or patient health? Mystandard analogy is that librarian strategies are more about verbs likeinforming, reading, learning, relating and deciding than about ourfoundations in nouns like content, books, databases and records. The focuswill be on balancing the human interactions with the provision of qualitycontent, all the while supporting the organization’s real goals and mission.

Over my career communication has changed from the simple memos,letters and phone calls of the 1980s. At very tiny cost, environments like

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Skype, Facebook and texting (and even old-style e-mail) are changing theone-to-one and group cohort communication dynamic. The removal ofbarriers like the cost of long-distance calls and the expense of multipledevices could change the economic and digital divides and could lead to asituation where ability and talent are the primary concerns.

Collaboration systems like Yammer and SharePoint are rapidly becom-ing the norm for business and government. Our clients are encountering aworld where the employer has an expectation that new hires arrive withabilities that are quite different from the model office of the last century.People will be working virtually and globally as access to talent and yourteam is no longer constrained by geography.

Access has moved from one where the mere retrieval of known items likeinformation and documents has shifted to one where sifting the good fromthe bad, the authoritative from the popular, consumer from professional, isa critical competency. Physical access is not enough. Intellectual and criticalthinking skills are essential and evolving in the context of a variety of searchtool options.

Presentation systems like WebEx and Adobe are progressing frombroadcast to interactive and this changes everything from education throughentertainment and business to politics. Making progress on learning,information and media literacy must be stressed as an HR goal to endowemployees with advanced credulity and transliteracy skills.

Learning management systems and personal learning networks havesuch great potential that the opportunities are largely underexploited so far.This will change in the next five years as we can see that the Blackboards,Moodles, MindTap and D2Ls that are evolving to support seamlessly theasynchronous needs, multiple languages, learning styles, disabilities, learnerpotentials and developmental differences of employees aligned with theenterprise goals. The emerging potential for adaptation to user behaviours,history, special needs and learning styles will materially change the dynamicsof information engagement as we move forward. As change increases itspace, these provide one of the greatest opportunities for learning andaddress the organization’s need to adapt to a rapidly changing workplaceand workforce.

Sharing and rating systems have the potential to crowdsource opinionand expert knowledge, even within a corporate context, quickly. Theneotonous systems in Amazon, YouTube and scholarly rating services aremoving inexorably to having a greater impact, especially in expert orenterprise networks focused on team or market success. Will all of usparticipate as team members or will we be standing outside looking in? Willwe be part of the team that ensures our users are able to process thedifference between consumer, algorithmic and expert recommendations?Will we be positioned as trusted advisors and team members?

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Creativity is moving to a new level. If your organization creates things,(and who doesn’t?), then we must pay attention to ‘inventing’. iTunes stylemusic and podcasts, YouTube or Netflix streaming, personal and groupblogging and personal publishing show just the tip of the iceberg of a worldwhere there is the opportunity for more people to present their creations andpoints of view. Affordable 3D printing, for example, is just starting! We arestarting to see the emergence of databases of key 3D objects like museumpieces. These are driving new and exciting competitive pressures. With morepeople tapping into a World Wide Web where diversity of creativity andaccess to the global marketplace and distribution systems we may see theemergence of a new Renaissance — as well as threats to industry andemployees unable or incapable of adapting.

All of the above are enhanced by the content systems and advancedaccess tools that are emerging in a circa 2012 post-Google world. Our usersand organizations will have too much access and not enough qualitycontent. Indeed it is the classic best of times, worst of times. We can bekey players in preparing our organizations for success. As more and moreof the corpus of historical and current print, audio and video contentbecomes accessible through digitization, the content fire hose demandshigher order skills — in all employees and not just information serviceprofessionals.

These social and technological changes will challenge our organizations.It has happened before. The Renaissance challenged intellectual under-standing of our world and led to fundamental changes in society and thestructuring of nations. The Industrial Revolution had a similar impact on ascale similar to what is happening today. In both instances there wasextreme resistance from those who had a vested interest and comfort withthe old ways. Sometimes we saw societal disruptions like war, revolution,Luddites and social protest movements. Many of us, and our colleagues, aresuccessful and have a vested interest in the status quo and yet we are allentering a period of increased transformational and disruptive change — ata faster pace than even the last few decades. In order to thrive, survive andevolve in a positive way, we will need to adapt and use our critical thinkingskills and values to question the change, adjust the sails and invest in ourown development. How can we do this?

13.1.4. Keep the Goal in Mind

The best way to adapt to disruptive and transformational change is toalways keep the goal in mind. What are the goals, in our industry, sector,library or learning context, that are related to these developments in socialand collaborative technology?

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First, focus on empowering our organizations with the decision support,question improvement, quality content, skills and competencies they need tosucceed in our society. To that end, we must ask ourselves — about everynew information technology — ‘‘Does this tool allow us to improve ourcolleagues and prepare them for the world they are encountering, in ascalable fashion?’’ We should ask ourselves a number of questions:

� Can we play with these tools in order to understand their potential better?� Can we ensure that these tools are worth adding to our pilots and trials tosee if they show potential for improving learning and teaching?� Can we first take prudent risks and delay judgment until we take aprofessional view of the potential and the risk in a timely fashion?� Can we monitor their potential and not make premature judgments? Touse an analogy, we can’t determine a great doctor or accountant bylooking at an infant. Do these environments show support for lifelonglearning, collaboration and social skills and perspectives that people willneed in order to be successful in the community and workplace world of2025? Will the world be a better place? Does the social glue, therelationships and the skills that bind, get better through their adoptionand use? Are we creating a more tolerant, open and engaging society orare we risking too many negative consequences and a greaterdivisiveness? What will be the impacts on our institutional culture? Dothese tools support the best of society — the world where newdiscoveries, inventions and creations are widely made, disseminated,enjoyed and used? Will greater progress to a more perfect world besupported? What are the inherent risks of these tools and how do wemitigate those risks? As information professionals, what is our bestadvice?

13.1.5. Positive Questions

These are the types of questions that we should be regularly asking at ourinstitutions and our professional organizations and conferences. These kindsof questions can focus us in challenging times. ‘‘We need better questions:

� How can we create amazing experiences every day for our users?� How can we develop our clients into expert questions-askers?� How can we make our libraries invaluable and irreplaceable in ourcommunities?� How can we nurture abundant curiosity?’’ [http://andyburkhardt.com/2012/05/24/ask-the-right-questions/]

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It is questions like these that can guide our thinking to do extraordinarythings and meet the challenge of change and the future. These questionspaint a vision of the future that is aligned with our goals and values andallows us create the future rather than to just have it happen to us and ourclients. We can make a choice to merely stay afloat or we can ask questionsand actively seek to create the kind of future we want.

‘‘What questions are you asking? What questions do you want to beasking?’’

Libraryland would be a happier place and we’d frame our challengesbetter using this approach more often.

13.2. Differences in the Private and Public Sector Approaches

There are differences and similarities between the public and private sectors.Both contain humans although a strong argument can be made fordifferences in the value systems of these employees. On the other hand, bothsectors must adapt to environmental changes such as demography andtechnology, and both must make progress on behalf of their constituentsand customers. Both must evolve. I’ve found this comparison below helpfulover the years in understanding both sectors.

13.2.1. Private Sector

� Competitive advantage is the ideal� Innovation is key to long-term existence� Focus on clients and marketshare� Business strategies� Responsibility to shareholders or owner/investors� Increasing revenue� Risk oriented� Economic success is a prime personal motivator� Competitors, partners and allies� e-Business is the challenge� Focus on ‘‘results’’

13.2.2. Public Sector

� Collaborative advantage is the ideal� Good service is the key to long-term existence

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� Focus on citizens and social contract� Political agendas and government imperatives� Responsibility to parliament and to citizens� Wise use of tax dollars� Risk averse� Making a positive impact on society is a strong motivator� Other departments, levels of government, unions� e-Government is the challenge� Focus on ‘‘process’’

Both sectors have identifiable, strong information needs and bothare facing challenges with adopting social and information technologies toserve their missions and meet their goals. With the selected professionalenvironments below, I’ll explore these from the perspective of the strategiesthat work in helping to meet the challenges of using information to supportdecision-making as well as to adapt to and adopt social, collaboration andinformation technologies. Training a critical mass of workers, in anyenvironments, on a scalable basis, is a real mountain to climb. Combinedwith the challenge of differing professional and institutional cultures itbecomes evident that there is a need for a focused strategy on the part of theinformation professional and professional librarianship.

13.3. Towards Information Fluency

So what does all this mean? I believe in the concept of information fluency.Information fluency is the ability to find, evaluate and use digital informationeffectively, efficiently and ethically in the context of your personal and workgoals and environment. Fluency implies that the skills of using informationmore effectively to make decisions that are seamlessly and comfortablyadapted by the user population. In this chapter I’ve outlined some of thespecifics and context of serving the information fluency needs of profes-sionals and workers in specific work environments. Information fluency is theend result of information literacy and transliteracy interventions in the workcontext. In order to be successful, we must acknowledge the followingunderpinnings to an information fluency strategy:

� Clearly articulate an alignment with the enterprise goals and mission.� Align with the learning styles and the adult learning modes of the targetpopulation(s).� Encourage an executive champion to give visible support.� Encourage word-of-mouth support and communicate testimonials.

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� Differentiate between those transliteracy skills for the entire populationand those that should be targeted at a specific population or accomplishedby librarians and information professionals.� Develop scalable solutions that transcend one-on-one as the sole trainingand development strategy.� Build deep personal relationships with co-workers, especially in criticaldepartments and units.� Build quantitative and qualitative measurements as well as storycollections to prove the impact and worth of the information literacyand fluency programmes.� Align all measurements with measures that align with core goals of theorganization as opposed to mere statistics that communicate effort out ofcontext.� Position the information professional as a trusted advisor and teammember on content quality and selection, research tools and approaches,social media applications, and research and development.� Choose a limited range of technologies and resources that simplify theprocess and reduce complexity in the institutional context. Continuouslyevaluate these technologies and resources and adapt and upgrade asneeded.� Balance physical and digital resources as appropriate in a hybrid strategy.

13.4. The Enterprise Context

The enterprise environment can be confusing. Some people see businessworkplaces as the model for the workplace but it is clear that educationalinstitutions are also workplaces and valid targets for employee informationliteracy training as well. Indeed the training of employees in the not-for-profit worlds of academe and teaching is poorly done and a key opportunityfor improvement of results. The for-profit world is investing in informationliteracy in the context of their mandates, but again, there is a lot of work tobe done. Let’s review a few key sectors.

13.4.1. Faculty

In many universities and colleges, the teaching and research employeessometimes get lost in the shuffle with respect to information literacy trainingas the focus is on endowing undergraduates with information literacycompetencies. In most respects, focusing on the professors and lecturers canhave a greater impact on more students than other strategies whileimproving research output as well. A hybrid model is obviously far better,

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but in times of restricted budgets sometimes choices about priorities must bemade. When faculty is not prioritized, things are left up to chance and thereis fragmented implementation of teaching and research literacy strategies.Too often too little investments are made in the teaching skills of those whoare tasked with delivering the programme. One success factor for libraries isthat when professors and lecturers are trained in the modern informationliteracy options available through the library and the network, then libraryuse can increase and the work product of students improves as well. Thistrain the trainer strategy is tried and true but still underutilized. Someresearch shows that even drop-out rates (retention rates) fall precipitouslyamong those students that use the library versus those that don’t. Onesuccessful hybrid programme for both students and faculty is that employedby the fully online information science and librarianship degree at theSchool of Information Studies at San Jose State University [SJSU] inCalifornia. [http://slisapps.sjsu.edu/gss/ajax/showSheet.php?id=4655]

13.4.2. Teachers

Teachers in the K-12 space are a special group. They are tasked withdelivering a broad programme that is undergoing dynamic change at thesame time as the technology framework and environment is changingrapidly. At the same time there are more opportunities to deal moreeffectively with the broad population of learners than ever before and thoselearners can often be ahead of the teachers technologically. Combined with atrend that shows an aging population of teachers as well as new entrants tothe profession we see opportunity challenged by the huge scale of thechange. One interesting initiative is that undertaken by INFOhio, which is astate cooperative delivering shared services such as OPAC/ILS manage-ment, database licensing and training. Their programme to invest in directtraining of teachers, principals and administrators in addition to the librarystaff in almost 2600 libraries. One challenge has been to align the variousschools with the principles of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills [http://www.p21.org/]. The challenge of meeting the P21 goals largely starts withpreparing the teachers to deliver on the vision. [http://learningcommons.infohio.org/]

13.4.3. The Professions

There is a cadre of key professions that have specific information needs thatdiffer when they are in research or teaching practice as opposed to whenthey are practicing their profession. Here are four groups of professions thathave very specific needs and impacts and where the results of a bad decision

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can have far reaching and even fatal consequences: medicine, law,engineering and the creative professions.

Doctors and nurses make decisions based on training and information.As a workplace, research shows that using the library has a proven effect onpatient mortality and treatment. Focusing on the effective use ofinformation and endowing medical teams with the needed skills wouldhave a positive effect.

Lawyers again have very specific needs. Generally, they have some skillsin searching legal databases but can often benefit from the experience andcompetencies of trained legal researchers like librarians and professionallegal researchers. Legal searching is quite complex. It also changesdynamically and the digital revolution in the law has made the practice oflegal research event more challenging. Lawyers demand that they havecomplete confidence in the comprehensiveness and authority of the decisionsand precedents that they are citing. It’s a professional responsibility andcan have effects as far as malpractice concerns. New rulings, statutes,regulations and rules have the potential to change advice and argumentsevery day. As with any workplace environment there are consequences,sometimes dire, to poor information and decisions including malpractice. Assuch, training lawyers for high levels of information literacy is a key to thesuccess of quality firms.

13.4.4. Engineers

The field of engineering is filled with professionals who accredited in theirfield as individual professionals and licensed by the authorities to practice.Like medicine and the law, lives are at stake and the consequences of poorperformance rise to a societal issue. If bridges or buildings collapse, orhardware fails, we look to engineers to both blame and sort out the causes.Engineering is based on information. As such, there are key informationliteracy skills required by engineers, including, first and foremost, knowingwhen and where to look for a standard, patent or code and how to apply it.Combine this with the general information needs for inventions, creativityor business needs, and you have a complex information ecology. Again,specialist engineering librarians play a key role in this sector as they trainend users in these important skills as well as perform complex searches forresearch and development teams.

13.4.5. The Creative Professions

This segment of professionals includes artists, advertisers, game developers,marketers, writers, and more. There are specialized information literacy

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issues that some into play here. These professionals can be ultra-creative anduse many, sometimes random, sources for inspiration. They can often bevisual leaners and find text not as satisfying as visual and graphic results likepictures and video. On the other hand, they can be quite data and researchdriven as they seek the right solution, plan or image to meet their or theirclient’s goals. As such, there are a number of specific information tools thatcan support their work and align with their needs. I include this oftenvisually oriented group of professionals to highlight that there is a widerange of people in the workplace who may or may not have skills that areneeded to use all forms of information, text, image, graphic, audio or videoand librarians can either teach, develop or perform these skills for theorganization.

13.4.6. Corporate Administrators and Business Decision-Makers,Professionals, Consultants

Previous sections discussed information literacy initiatives and strategies foremployees in learning and research environments. In those environments thegoal is to meet the institutional needs to create new knowledge and to createnew knowledge workers. Often these environments prepare people toachieve in the for-profit space where supporting quality decision-makingwith quality information has been a continuing challenge for speciallibrarians to support the specialized needs of workers and professionals inthe context of business decision-making.

13.4.7. What is a Decision?

A decision is the act or process of deciding, a determination arrived at afterconsideration, and promptness and firmness in deciding is an importantattribute. According to Wikipedia, ‘‘Decision making can be regarded as themental processes (cognitive process) resulting in the selection of a course ofaction among several alternative scenarios. Every decision making processproduces a final choice. The output can be an action or an opinion ofchoice’’.

‘‘It is important to differentiate between problem analysis and decisionmaking. The concepts are completely separate from one another.Traditionally it is argued that problem analysis must be done first, so thatthe information gathered in that process may be used towards decisionmaking’’. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_making]

Aligning workplace literacy strategies with the ultimate decision-makingcapacity of the host organizations is key to the success of informationliteracy strategies in this context. Librarians play key roles in almost every

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step of the problem analysis and decision-making processes in enterpriseenvironments especially in training employees to use information effectivelyin these stages. The opportunity for information professionals can be quitelarge and have an enterprise-wide impact in ensuring that the end users inthe organization can:

� Use information effectively to underpin decisions and can separate qualityinformation from bad or suspect information;� Have confidence in their decisions;� Make the right decisions in a timely fashion;� Can adjust processes as new information becomes available;� Speak and act with authority;� Make decisions in a cost-effective manner;� Make fewer errors and be as efficient as possible, time is money.

13.5. Conclusion

Workplace literacy is different. It builds on the skills we see taught andexperienced in the consumer and education space but it focuses on the needsof the enterprise and aligns with the mission of the organization to succeed.In short, it is more narrowly focused and may indeed focus beyond just thecontext of the enterprise but focus just on tools, technology, policies, andcontent that are licensed or available to the organization. Therefore, in thesework environments information literacy is quite different. It is:

1. Highly targeted to just those employees who are involved in the decisionsbeing made in the context of the workplace goals including profit or othermeasurements of output and success.

2. In the context of the organization, it is framed in the technologicalframework of that enterprise and on the approved tools (mobile device,intranet, licensed e-resources, etc.) that are emphasized, taught orpermitted.

3. Likely to be mandated from the top with an internal champion to besuccessful.

4. Involve real business issues and focus more on the practical uses and lesson theoretical frameworks.

5. Likely to focus on compliance with regulatory frameworks such asSarbanes-Oxley, the SEC, medical or legal policies, or other rules,confidentiality and trade secret concerns.