Project structure

We are working in partnership with the Sheffield University Students' Union Liberation Officers to bring Librarians together with Library Student Associates to organise creative workshops in the library.  The project is taking a participatory action research approach, blended with in-depth semi-structured interviews  for its methodology. The research question is: How can focussing on "information creation as a process" (ACRL, 2015) contribute to the movement to liberate the library? The research aim is: to  understand more about the relationship between information creation and library liberation. We will be running workshops to align with the liberation priorities of our students, to coincide with Black History Month, Disability History Month, Reclaim the Night and LGBT+ History Month. Our work will feed into work being led by the IATUL Special Interest Group for Information Literacy, to develop an open educational resource on liberating information literacy. 

The research objectives are to:

● Complete a review of the literature on information creation as a process and library liberation to situate this research within a broader context.

● Undertake in-depth interviews with librarians leading information and digital literacy (IDL) innovations across UK HE, academics from the institution’s Inclusive Learning Committee and student leaders including the Student Union Liberation Officer.

● Collaboratively design a creative workshop plan and capture the design as research data.

● Collaboratively deliver creative IDL workshops. Events to coincide with liberation themes, suggested by the Student Union Liberation Team 2022-23: Black History, Disability History, Gender Rights and LGBT+ History. Capture collaborative reflections as research data.

● Write up the research and disseminate a conceptual model for a liberated library within the institution and beyond.

● Develop an animation to disseminate research findings in an engaging form.

● Contribute research, workshop design and the animation into an open educational resource (OER) to upskill IDL practitioners.