Workplace information literacy skills

Abstract

Purpose -The purpose of this study is to investigate the level of information literacy (IL) skills competency among university library professionals in Karachi, Pakistan, and to address areas of concern.Design/methodology/approach -An online survey was designed, using Google Forms, to collect data from 77 academic librarians working in 25 universities in Karachi, Pakistan. Questions covered 6 generic attributes: library systems, information resources, searching techniques, research support, information literacy, and generic / personal. Findings -The results indicate that the librarians who were surveyed had good IL skills in information searching and locating information resources. However, the average of all survey responses was 54.17 per cent, with 12 of the 24 competencies receiving scores of less than 50 per cent, thus indicating a generally overall low level of IL competency in the workplace.Research limitations/implications -As the study was limited to universities in Karachi, it would be useful to apply the same methodology to other administrative units within the country. Further research is indicated on the potential impact of gender on aspects such as level of IL skills and motivation to enhance workplace competencies.Practical implications -The authors have suggested a number of strategies, which would be applicable globally to any university library wishing to improve the IL skills competencies of its staff.Originality/value -There have been no previous published, non-discipline-specific, research studies on the IL skills competencies of academic librarians in Pakistan.

Effect of information literacy on lifelong learning, creativity, and work performance among journalists

“…This finding is also partially in line with the results of Zhang and Wang (2022) who reported that the investigative journalists recruited from different countries had average levels of information skills and literacy in the era of social media. However, this finding contradicted that of many other relevant studies in Pakistan addressing IL in other professional contexts such as scientists (Anwar, 1981;Naveed, 2022;Naveed and Rafique, 2018), investigation officers (Naveed and Kamran, 2022), lawyers (Naveed and Shah, 2022), teachers (Rafique, 2014;Santos and Oliveira, 2013) and librarians (Ali and Richardson, 2018) as these studies reported that the IL skills of the survey participant were not at the optimum levels.…”

“…Santos and Oliveira (2013) provided an insight into the use of IL skills among librarians in Brazil. Ali and Richardson (2018) investigated the levels of IL skills among university librarians in Karachi and reported that these library professionals had good skills particularly for searching for information resources and had low levels of overall IL skills.…”

Information literacy at journalists’ workplace in Pakistan

“…Though workplace information literacy is getting tremendous popularity among international researchers, there is a dearth of research in the local context. In Pakistan, only a few researchers have targeted different professionals in the context of WIL (Ali and Richardson, 2018; Anwar, 1981; Naveed, 2022; Naveed and Rafique, 2018). These studies investigated scientists, teachers, and library professionals.…”

Digital literacy skills among African library and information science professionals – an exploratory study

“…In this study, he indicated the future role of librarians and skills in detail such as digital and data librarian, embedded librarians, educator of multiliteracy, licence negotiator, knowledge manager and many more. Ali and Richardson (2018) reported that workplace information literacy skills of Pakistani library professionals. Their study reports show that library professionals are good at the basic operational level of library skills such as searching techniques, providing information to the users, marketing and administrative skills, and at the same time, they are bad at library module services, lack of knowledge of copyrights and less knowledge on research supporting software like plagiarism software, reference management software and many other too.…”