Making a dent? Information literacy instruction in Canada's public libraries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This poster presents results of Canada's only recent study of information literacy (IL) practices in public libraries. The overall objective of this project was to explore the actual and potential role of public libraries in Canada in developing the public's information literacy skills. A skills deficit exists among the general population, ironically in parallel with much (misplaced) confidence about those skills; that deficit is a kind of second‐level digital divide (Hargittai, ). Thus, access to digital information in particular is compromised in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. Despite an urgent need to develop IL skills, and expectations that public libraries fulfill that role (Canadian Library Association, 1998) (imposed by the federal government ‘Connecting Canadians’ initiative, particularly via the Community Access Program) (Government of Canada, 2006), the author's previous research suggested that the real experiences of public librarians and of public library customers may not bear out this expectation. Public libraries are challenged to fulfill the policy roles imposed by the federal government, because of a systemic lack of resources, because public libraries attempt to fulfill a range of roles (e.g, social gathering place, developers of early literacy, supporters of life‐long learning, supporters of recreational needs), and because library staff are conflicted about imposed mandates in the face of these historical roles.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".