New InformAll, new blog

By Stéphane Goldstein

This is my inaugural blog for the re-launched InformAll website. It’s been re-launched because InformAll is shortly to acquire a life of its own; from January, it becomes an social enterprise in its own right, and independent consultancy focused on developing awareness of information literacy. It will no longer operate under the auspices of the Research Information Network (RIN), which has been my professional home for the past ten years. RIN closes its doors for the last time at the end of December, in the wake of its highly successful track record since its foundation in 2005. I shall miss it greatly, but it’s time to move on, and I look forward to developing the information literacy agenda that I have latterly been responsible for at RIN.

So, it’s a new beginning, a refreshed venture, and an exciting one too. Other parts of the website explain what InformAll is about, how we work and what we’ve achieved to date – I hope that readers of this blog will take a few minutes to look around. Collaborative working is central to InformAll’s ethos, and we very much welcome opportunities to develop ideas and projects with prospective partners; please do feel free to contact me if this is of interest, or even if you just want to be kept abreast of our developments.

The aim of this blog is to sound off occasionally on issues that are relevant to the world of information literacy – and other related literacies, since the boundaries between these is often fluid, and I’m not fixated on precise terminology or on whether one literacy is somehow more important than another. I hope, therefore, that the blog will make a small and humble contribution to discourse in this area. On occasion, I might even attempt to make it entertaining. Importantly, I’d welcome contributions from anyone interested in contributing their thoughts. If you have something that you’d like to say, preferably in the space of 500-1,000 words, please let me know – I’d be happy to publish it.

A final word about the photos that will appear here: I’m a keen photographer, and I’d like to lighten up the look of the blog with a bit of interesting imagery. Photos on the theme of information are almost inevitably clichéd or hackneyed (and just try finding images that somehow reflect information literacy!), so I’ll just post stuff that I’ve shot or come across recently, and that might be relevant to what I’ve been doing of late. Today’s offering was taken in Tallinn, Estonia, the venue for the recent European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL), which I was lucky enough to present at.

Photo: Tallinn, Estonia – Stéphane Goldstein on Flickr – CC BY-ND 2.0