Online Panel - Information as a Discipline: what's the difference

If Information Literacy is taken seriously as a discipline, if people aren't shy to say that Information Literacy is a real subject of study and research - what changes? What could be different, not just for educators, students, researchers and librarians, but also for people of all ages outside formal education, and in different parts of the world? That is the focus of this international panel session which celebrates Global Media and Information Literacy Week 2024.

This event is co-organised by the CILIP Information Literacy Group, the Purdue University Institute for Information Literacy, USA, and the University of Sheffield Information School, Libraries and Information Society Research Group. UK.

The panellists are Dr. Karen Kaufmann (Assistant professor, School of Information, University of South Florida, USA), Bill Johnston (activist and retired academic, Scotland), Dr Clarence Maybee (Associate Dean for Learning and the W. Wayne Booker Endowed Chair in Information Literacy at Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies, USA), Dr Syeda Shahid (Assistant Professor, Towson University, USA) and Sheila Webber (Senior Lecturer, University of Sheffield Information School, UK). They are members of the international group of researchers and practitioners, ILIAD: Information Literacy Is A Discipline (https://www.iliad-group.org/), advancing scholarly conversation around the idea that information literacy is a maturing discipline (Webber & Johnston, 2017). Since 2022 they have been developing wider debate via panel sessions (Maybee et al., 2023), and forthcoming from Facet Publishing in 2025 is an edited volume with contributors from 20 countries, Information Literacy Handbook: Charting the Discipline.

The panel will identify changes that could come about from seeing Information Literacy (IL) as a discipline. Each panel member will identify a longer term change that could happen if IL was more widely recognised as a discipline, and note some of the conditions needed to achieve this. There will then be time for participants to debate what IL as a discipline entails and the changes that could be achieved.