Text by: Cally Lo
As a newcomer to this field, I always love to visit different libraries. Through different library visits, I could always learn a lot and have a better understanding of the library field. On 16th June, my mentor Brian invited me to his institution, HKBU Library, for a library visit. He took me to different sections of the library and introduced some of his colleagues to me. He arranged a short meeting for me and Chloe, one of the HKLC coordinators and also an Information Services Librarian. I had a chance to do a short interview with her to know more about her job duties.
Chloe’s job duties are mostly related to information literacy. During the meeting, she shared with me some of the projects which she has been handling. Of these, the UGC Teaching and Learning Project on Information Literacy highly impressed me. It is a unique project since this is the first time that 8 JULAC libraries are cooperating together to apply for funding to enhance the information literacy of higher education students in Hong Kong. There are many parts to this project, and Chloe is mainly involved in the Course Enhancement Fund sub-project. In this sub-project, each participating institution has 5 Course Enhancement Funds. It aims to encourage librarians to reach out to different faculty members to identify the needs of their courses. Then they can cooperate and organize some activities to improve information literacy teaching and learning.
Chloe also shared some examples with me. The first example is one of the funds that has been used to help public relations (PR) students to learn how to create infographics. Librarians used the fund to create workshops and subscribe to some infographic tools for PR students to use when they are working on projects and assignments. Another example is a project where librarians plan to cooperate with the faculty running a journalism course to build a fact-checking website for Hong Kong. As there is more fake news on the internet nowadays, fact-checking websites have become popular in other countries. Since there is no fact-checking website in Hong Kong so they would like to create one.
In my opinion, I think the UGC Teaching and Learning Project on Information Literacy project is meaningful. The information literacy skills that students learnt will be useful in both their study and career in the future. Thank you to Chloe for sharing. Now I have a better understanding of the work done by the Information Services section and the importance of information literacy.