Things unlimited?

Jess Crilly, University of the Arts London, j.crilly@arts.ac.uk

The University of the Arts London launched the DIAL project (Digital Integration into Arts Learning) in 2011. DIAL is one of the projects in the JISC Developing Digital Literacies programme.

DIAL focuses on the development of digital literacies in Arts Higher Education with the primary goal of improved graduate employability.

The project takes a community-based approach, enabling students and staff to support each other to realise their aspirations collectively and individually. Various groups within the University have self identified to work with DIAL, and Library Services is one of those groups. We are focusing on digital information literacy, developing capacity and capability in our own library staff to address the barriers identified by the DIAL project:

1) Ensuring students and staff perceive the relevance of a range of digital literacies to their own professional and personal lives, so they are motivated to explore and experiment, activities which are essential to maintaining currency2) Sustaining change cost effectively3) Providing training and development in a context where skills and experience vary enormously within and between groups of students and staff, and where existing skills are hard to diagnose efficiently and accurately.

We want to find ways to harness the knowledge and enthusiasm of early adopters in Library Services as well as to support staff who want to develop skills further, and to provide a forum for discussion on incorporating digital tools into our practice: this will then enhance the ways in which we support and engage with our users.

We are working to understand our current levels of skills, and the areas we want to develop. We are looking at ways of doing this – using the 23 things approach as an inspiration and starting point – to move to things unlimited – a flexible, open, online digital information literacy resource.

The paper presents our work in progress.