Presented at LILAC 2018

1. Reviewing the role of
teaching librarians in
supporting student’s
digital capabilities
Manfred Gschwandtner
Learning & Research Librarian – Canterbury Christ Church University
Pam McKinney
Information School, University of Sheffield

2. Job description:
Learning and Research Librarian (Learning and Teaching)
Main Duties:
... Lead on the design and deliver an embedded and contextualised programme of
Information and Digital Literacy to a diverse range of learners, utilising a blend of
face-to-face and online channels…..

3. Aim
The aim of my Masters Dissertation was
to understand how a Health Faculty
supports students and staff in
developing their digital capabilities.

4. Objectives
The objectives where to
1. identify the stakeholders involved in the provision of digital capabilities in
the Faculty
2. conduct a series of interviews with these stakeholders to investigate
a) their general conception of digital literacy
b) which digital capabilities they support and how
c) the role of librarian’s in supporting students to develop their digital
capabilities
3. make recommendations on how to improve the support of digital
capabilities in the Faculty

5. Objectives
The objectives where to
1. identify the stakeholders involved in the provision of digital capabilities in
the Faculty
2. conduct a series of interviews with these stakeholders to investigate
a) their general conception of digital literacy
b) which digital capabilities they support and how
c) the role of librarian’s in supporting students to develop their digital
capabilities
3. make recommendations on how to improve the support of digital
capabilities in the Faculty

7. Changing the Context
Walton, G. (2016) “Digital Literacy” (DL): Establishing the
Boundaries and Identifying the Partners, New Review of Academic
Librarianship, 22:1, 1-4
• In this editorial Walton is thinking about academic librarians as being part of
a DL curriculum or working in the context of a DL framework
• “The library has to establish what it currently delivers in the way of
information literacy that can form part of the DL curriculum. At the same
time, the library should establish what it potentially could develop as part
of DL, over and above its current practice.” (p. 3)

8. Outline
• JISC’s “6 Elements of Digital Capabilities”
(JISC, 2016) as a framework for this review.
• Methods
• Results
• Discussion
• Conclusion

9. Digital Literacy Framework

10. JISC Digital Capabilities Framework
“6 Elements of digital capabilities”
(JISC, 2016)
“Digital capabilities are the
capabilities which fit someone
for living, learning and working
in a digital society.“
https://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/building-digital-capability

11. JISC Digital Capabilities Framework
Element 2:
Information, Media and Data Literacies
(JISC, 2016)

12. JISC Digital Capabilities Framework
Element 6:
Digital Identity and wellbeing
(JISC, 2016)

13. Methods

14. Methods
• Literature Review
• 14 interviews with DL stakeholders (qualitative method)
• All stakeholders were related to one faculty (case study)
• The semi structures interviews included 8 Questions
• “Thematic analysis” was used to identify themes and
patterns in the data

15. Results
Literature Review

16. Literature Review
• When librarians talk about digital literacy they talk about
• “digital information literacy”
(=finding, evaluating and organizing digital information)
• teaching it online
• teaching the digital skills (IT skills) necessary for teaching
information literacy
(e.g. saving files or using appropriate software to organize information)
(Cordell, 2013 ; Kenton & Blummer, 2010 ; …)

17. Literature Review
• Nevertheless, there are examples of librarians going
beyond this practice by teaching data literacy (Digital
Humanities, digital scholarship) or social media topics
including digital participation or digital identity.

18. Literature Review
• Librarians can develop and teach a critical and reflective approach
to social media and to a culture of online participation and
sharing (Rheingold, 2012), (Scheaffer & Little, 2014).
• The “Digital Tattoo” Project https://digitaltattoo.ubc.ca/

19. Literature Review
Other Examples:
• “Digital 2.0” project
“Disadvantaged groups and vulnerable social groups of people with special needs “
(Bernsmann & Croll, 2013, p. 53) took part in IT and social media training mostly run by
librarians
• “What’s On the Menu?”, Digital Humanities project,
NY Public Library
Building and maintaining a database/website including
the world’s largest collection of restaurant menus.
Teaching interventions lead by librarians.
Using the website and extracting, annotating,
contextualizing and visualize data (Pun, 2015)

20. Results
Qualitative Case Study

21. Stakeholders interviewed
• Interviews with 14 stakeholders
• The stakeholders involved were :
academics, students, librarians, academic learning
and skills developers, IT, careers, learning
technologists, academic developers….

22. Interview Questions
• Interview question 5 (Q5):
What is your opinion on the role of librarians related to
digital literacy?

23. Q5 – Role of Librarians:
• Overall, there was a strong emphasis from most participants that librarians teach
information literacy.
Librarians are the ones who “oversee the finding of information, the organization
of information, the sifting out of irrelevant information”.
They “support students when they look seeking information, or trying to verify
information, or trying to find that evidence”.
• Primarily, they are not seen as a service that teaches students in other elements
of the digital literacy framework such as creation, communication, collaboration,
participation or digital identity.

24. Q5 – Role of Librarians:
Ideas of areas librarians could engage that emerged during
the interviews were:
• Being more involved in data management
• Better engagement with students using social media
• Upskilling librarians to take part in IT support
• Supporting digital citizenship
• Supporting collaboration (between students on placement)

25. Summary
• Librarians are seen as mainly involved in teaching digital information
literacy
• They support IT skills necessary to find, evaluate and organise
information
• Librarians are mostly seen as experts in information literacy and not in
other elements of the framework
• There are some examples in the literature of librarians going “over and
above” this current practice

26. Discussion

27. Is this ok or shall
we change
something?
Should librarians
support more
elements of the
Framework?

28. Should librarians support more
elements of the framework?
1. It depends on our individual skills,
interests and on our level of confidence
(Professional Development).
2. It depends on possible benefits.

29. Professional Development
A SCONUL study (Mackenzie, A. et al, 2016) asked senior library managers how they
would “assess the digital capabilities of staff whose core roles are student support
and academic liaison.” (JISC’s Seven Elements of Digital Literacies)

30. Professional Development
“How important is it for staff to develop an expertise in this areas?”
This study shows that there is
not enough expertise in other
areas than IL and a need for
professional development.

31. Benefits
• Digital literacy is seen as an essential strategic aim in most HE
institutions (L&T strategies, graduate attributes)
• Digital Literacy is essentially linked to other important
strategic aims such as employability or inclusion.
• Because of this, digital literacy is a pragmatic “way in”
for librarians to collaborate with the Faculties in curriculum
design or teaching.

32. Benefits
• Boosts our collaboration with faculties and other professional
services (teaching, curriculum development)
• It repositions the librarian as part of a wider service/team/group
• Within these teams librarians can negotiate with the other team
members which elements of the framework they want to cover.
• Improves the student-facing support which mainly depends on
academics in the Faculty that I analysed.

33. Benefits
• Raises the profile and visibility of librarians in Faculties
• Enables librarians to try “new things” out of
the comfort zone
.

34. Conclusion

35. Conclusion
• In the context of JISC’s digital capabilities framework librarians
are mainly seen as supporting digital information literacy,
occasionally supporting other elements.
• Our core responsibility is to enhance student’s information
literacy..
• ...but it would be beneficial to support other elements of the JISC
Digital Capabilities Framework and to focus our support on the
digitally literate student, not only on the information literate
student.

36. Conclusion
• Professional Development to upskill librarians in different
elements of the digital capabilities framework is essential.
• More research is needed to better understand what librarians
already do in this context, what motivates them to do this and
how successful this support is.

37. Thank you!

38. References
Bernsmann, S., & Croll, J. (2013). Lowering the threshold to libraries with social media: The approach of
“Digital Literacy 2.0”, a project funded in the EU Lifelong Learning Programme. Library Review, 62(1),
53–58. http://doi.org/10.1108/00242531311328168
Cordell, R. M. (2013). Information Literacy and Digital Literacy: Competing or Complementary?
Communications in Information Literacy, 7(2), 177–183
JISC. (2016). Building digital capabilities: The six elements defined. Retrieved July 11, 2017, from
http://repository.jisc.ac.uk/6611/1/JFL0066F_DIGIGAP_MOD_IND_FRAME.PDF
Kenton, J., & Blummer, B. (2010). Promoting digital literacy skills: examples from the literature and
implications for academic librarians. Community & Junior College Libraries, 16(2), 84–99.
http://doi.org/10.1080/02763911003688737
Mackenzie, A., & Martin, L. (Eds.). (2016). Developing digital scholarship: emerging practices in
academic libraries. Facet Publishing.

39. References
Pun, R. (2015). Conceptualizing the integration of digital humanities in instructional
services: Possibilities to enhance digital literacy in the 21st century. Library Hi Tech,
33(1), 134–142.
Rheingold, H. (2012). Stewards of digital literacies. Knowledge Quest, 41(1), 52–55.
SCONUL (2012) Summary report on baseline survey of digital literacy. Available at:
http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/66781051/SCONUL Baseline
summary.pdf (Accessed: 23 March 2018).
Scheaffer, K., & Little, G. (2014). Champions of Digital Literacy: Fostering a World of
Informed Digital Producers. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 40(3–4), 408–409.
http://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2014.06.004

41. Personal Experience
• Workshops on digital literacy (not “digital information literacy”)
e.g. “Visitors & Residents” and social media workshops
• Together with a Learning technologist we started a university wide Digital Capabilities
Working Group
• Project on developing a peer mentoring programme for digital capabilities
• Research project with the Faculty

42. Disadvantages
• Waters down our identity as “information professionals”
• We would advocate the “wrong” aim by supporting students
to become digitally literate and not information literate.
• By fully supporting digital literacy we are sidelining
information literacy
• (digital) information literacy and digital literacy are very similar
concepts looking at the same thing with a different focus
• For example: DL concepts such as collaboration or participation
can also be seen as part of information literacy

43. Which elements of the Framework
can librarians support?
More research necessary to better understand
what librarians already do in this context and
how they could improve their support of
digital capabilities.

44. Q4: Support of digital capabilities
If you think about your role, which aspects of Digital Literacy
do you address?
(JISC’s 6 elements digital literacy are shown to the participants and they
comment on each of the different elements)

45. Results
In order to visualize the support for different capabilities by
different stakeholders I created two tables which included
• the 14 digital capabilities of the JISC Framework,
• the stakeholders
and which differentiated between
• 3 different levels of support
• Student and staff facing support

46. Results
Levels of support:
Dark blue = Strong support: reported support is a key responsibility of the role
Light blue = Support: reported support is not at key responsibility of the role,
happens incidentally, occasionally or cursory
White = No support

47. Results
Student facing and staff facing support.
• Student facing means that a stakeholder directly works with students with regard
to digital capabilities
• Staff facing means that a stakeholder works with members of staff (usually
academics) to upskill them in digital literacy so they can better teach it directly to
the students.

48. Table 1: Student facing support

49. Table 2: Staff facing support

50. Results
• Student facing support is more fragmented and less robust especially in element 3, 4
and 6
• Staff facing support is more robust especially in element 3, 4 and 6
• The frequency of strong support (dark blue) is higher for staff facing than for student
facing 36 (student) : 58 (staff)
• Student facing support relies mainly on academic staff especially in element 3, 4 and
6 with some help in 1, 2 and 5 from student facing services such as Academic
Learning Development, Careers, IT or the Library.

51. Conclusion
• The literature review and the qualitative analysis shows that in
the context of the JISC “6 elements of Digital Capabilities”
librarians mainly support digital information literacy
• Changing this practice and engaging with other elements of this
framework has the potential to be highly beneficial for librarians.
• Better aligns their work with overall University policies
and frameworks
• Fosters collaboration
• It can raise the profile of the librarians in the Faculty and
the University

52. Results
• Academics bear most of the responsibility to teach students the different elements digital
capabilities outlined in the JISC framework.
• The quality of supporting digital capabilities relies to a great degree on the academic’s
knowledge and enthusiasm regarding digital technologies
• If a tutor is not enthusiastic about the use of blogs, wikis or social media in her or his
teaching than it is very unlikely that students acquire these practices (Littlejohn et al.,
2012).
• No equality across groups

53. Recommendations
1. Upskilling academics and encouraging them to embrace digital technolgy
2. Improving direct support for students by
a) building multidisciplinary teams for each Faculty that includes mainly student
facing stakeholders such as academic learning development, library, careers, IT
and the Faculty learning technologist.
This team is a “pool of experts” that is not “upskilling” staff but proactively
supports academics in teaching various digital capabilities by directly working with
students.
a) Improving peer mentoring by training „digital champions“ in each year group and
programme

54. Qualitative Case Study - Summary
1. Digital Literacy is supported by different stakeholder
2. Since direct support for student is very fragmented it makes sense that these different
stakeholder start working together (e.g. in a multidisciplinary team) in order to support
students collaboratively
3. The librarian could be part of this team and has the opportunity to engage in various
aspects of digital literacy not just in digital information literacy.
4. In general, the stakeholder did not think that there is a lot of collaboration between
them at the moment.

55. What have we done so far..
Reviewing the role of academic librarians in supporting student’s
digital capabilities
• Literature review
• Qualitative Case study looking at
• the perception of librarians with regard to digital
capabilities by different stakeholder
• Overall support for DC in the Faculty and the possible role
of the librarian in a multidisciponary team

56. Discussion
• Using a Digital Literacy framework to review the role of librarians in
supporting digital capabilities is essential because it demonstrates the
scope of digital capabilities from “ICT proficiency” to “Digital
Wellbeing”
• The literature review and the qualitative study show that the role of
librarians in supporting digital literacy is predominantly seen as
teaching “digital information literacy”.
• There are some examples in the literature of librarians going beyond
this current practice and some suggestions by the stakeholders what
else librarians could do.

57. Aim
… to understand how librarians can support students
in developing their digital capabilities

58. Other findings
• Stakeholder’s conception of digital literacy is predominantly associated with
more traditional concepts of digital literacy such as basic IT skills or finding
and critiquing digital information. Social media and the related capabilities
such as communication, participation or digital identity were less prevalent.
• Digital capabilities are seen as a means to an end and are usually taught by
being embedded into a course and by supporting its learning outcomes.
• The “invisibility” of digital literacy

59. Background
• New job description
• “The library has to establish what it currently delivers in the way of information
literacy that can form part of the DL curriculum. At the same time, the library
should establish what it potentially could develop as part of DL, over and above its
current practice.” (Walton, 2016)
• Masters Dissertation on this topic for an MA in Library and Information Services
Management (distance learning) at the University of Sheffield (Information School)

60. Other findings
• Collaboration: “there is definitely more room for improvement
around collaboration.”.. and collaborations are “not labelled as
such and it’s not formalized and it’s not structured”.
• There is an opportunity for librarians to support elements of
digital capabilities that go beyond information literacy.
• Hardly any research on digital literacy is carried out.

61. How can librarians
support students in
developing their digital
capabilities?

62. Background
• Compared to information literacy, a lot of stakeholders are involved in Digital literacy
• The librarians I am interested in are academic librarians and within the academic
librarians the “teaching librarians”

63. Multidisciplinary Teams
• An opportunity for professional services to boost collaboration
• Faculty based
• An opportunity to review job descriptions and to improve direct
student support (LRS restructure, Learning Technologists)
• Support and train peer mentors
• The teams could be part of the new
Digital Capabilities Working Group

64. Peer mentoring - Digital Champions
• Upskilling students to directly support their peers
• Programme and cohort/group level
• Discussion with Peer Mentoring Service started
(e.g. Peer Assisted Learner Leaders (PALs) could
become “digital champions”)
• Incentives for students

65. Strategic aim
Our main aim is to support students in developing their
digital capabilities to learn, live and work successfully
in a digital society.

66. Strategic objectives
In order to achieve this aim I think we need to focus strategically on
• Upskill academics and get them enthusiastic about DC in L&T
• Improving collaboration of the professional services
• Developing effective peer mentoring
• Develop both a generic University wide support and tailored
programme/module level support

67. IL vs. DL
… one of the major differences between IL
and DL is that much more stakeholders
consider themselves involved in providing DL
support than in providing IL support.

68. Stakeholders Conception
of Digital Literacy (?)
When asked to think about their conception of digital literacy participants mentioned
specific elements of digital literacy (such familiarity with social media, digital
communication…)
Amongst these elements the information literacy element of digital literacy - finding,
evaluating and managing digital information – was mentioned often. The two librarians,
the academic learning and skills developer, the two learning technologists, career, the
academics and one student mentioned them when they thought about their
conception of digital literacy.
On the other hand, the elements of digital literacy which are more related to social
media such as communication, collaboration, participation or digital identity came up
less frequent.

69. Collaboration
More collaboration was one of the most mentioned wishes for
the future. Everybody should head “in the same direction and
knowing that we are all providing the right support at the right
time”, we all “need to be singing from the same song book”
and should be “unified in our approach, because it’s the way
the world is. It's the way the world's expanding and we need to
make sure that our students are equipped with the right skills
and resources”

70. Aim of the Masters Dissertation
The overall aim of this dissertation was to understand
how a Faculty in HE institution in the UK supports students
and staff in developing their digital capabilities.

71. Stakeholders
2 Academics
2 Students
2 Librarians
1 Academic learning and skills developer
1 IT services manager
1 Career development adviser
2 Learning technologists
1 Student engagement officer
1 Senior Academic Developer
1 Learning and Teaching Manager from the Faculty
(1 Student Disability Service Manager)

72. Stakeholders Conception
of Digital Literacy

73. Student support
Academics
Staff support (Academics)
Learning
technologists
Academic
Developer
IT
L&TManager

74. Student support
Academics
Staff support (Academics)
Learning
technologists
Academic
Developer
IT
L&TManager
Multi-Discipl.Team
Digitalchampions

75. Literature Review
1. Your assessment of the digital capabilities of staff whose core roles are student support and academic liaison.
Staff expertise Importance of staff
developing expertise in
this area
Comments to help
qualify responses
Expert Competent Novice N/A
a. ICT/Computer
Literacy
b. Information
Literacy
c. Media literacy
d. Communication
& Collaboration
e. Digital
scholarship
f. Learning skills
2. Please add any digital literacies which are not represented in the list developed by the JISC (Optional)

78. Professional Development
A SCONUL study (2012) asked senior library managers how they would assess their
staff regarding the support of digital capabilities (JISC’s Seven Elements of Digital
Literacies)
Results:
• In most of the digital capabilities listed staff was assessed by their managers as either
competent or novice and not as experts (expect for information literacy)
• There is a “general agreement on the importance of developing expertise in each
area”

79. Academic Librarians
• Liaison Librarians
• Subject Librarians
• Learning Support Librarians
• Information Advisers
• Learning & Research librarians
…Librarians working in Higher Education
and who are involved in
teaching/supporting information literacy

80. Digital Literacy ≈ Digital Capabilities

81. Digital Literacy & Librarians
Librarian teaching
digital literacy
Digitally Literate Librarian

82. Literature Review
• The term “digital literacy” was coined by Paul Gilster (1997)
• For Gilster “digital literacy” is “the ability to understand and
use information in multiple formats from a wide range of
resources when it is presented via computers.” (p. 33)
• For him, the core competence to understand and use
information is critical thinking.
• For librarians, Gilster’s definition of digital literacy
is important because it is strongly connected
to information literacy.

83. Literature Review
• Littlejohn, Beetham and Mcgill (2012) analyzed the provision of digital
literacy in UK higher education institutions.
• They found that academic skills departments, libraries and IT services
are amongst the main stakeholders involved in digital literacy.
• Historically, the role of librarians in digital literacy is closely related to
development of the role of subject librarians
• Embracing new technology (databases, internet), subject librarians
turned into digital information specialists (Pinfield, 2001) and
therefore, supported the digital literacy agenda.

84. Should librarians support more
elements of the framework?
Librarians
1 ICT Proficiency
2
Information Literacy
Data Literacy
Media Literacy
3
Digital Creation
Digital Problem solving
(Research)
Digital Innovation
4
Digital Communication
Digital Collaboration
Digital Participation
5
Digital Learning
Digital Teaching
6
Digital Identity
Digital Wellbeing
Librarian2*
1 ICT
2
Information Literacy
Data Literacy
Media Literacy
3
Digital Creation
Digit. Problem solving
(Research)
Digital Innovation
4
Digital Communication
Digital Collaboration
Digital Participation
5
Digital Learning
Digital Teaching
6
Digital Identity
Digital Wellbeing
* Answers of Librarian 2 in the study on which Digital Capabilities he currently supports
?
Dark blue = strong support, key responsibility
Light blue = occasional support
White = No support