1. Things unlimited?
Jess Crilly, University of the Arts London, j.crilly@arts.ac.uk
The University of the Arts London launched the DIAL project (Digital Integration into
Arts Learning) in 2011. DIAL is one of the projects in the JISC Developing Digital
Literacies programme.
DIAL focuses on the development of digital literacies in Arts Higher Education with
the primary goal of improved graduate employability.
The project takes a community-based approach, enabling students and staff to
support each other to realise their aspirations collectively and individually. Various
groups within the University have self identified to work with DIAL, and Library
Services is one of those groups. We are focusing on digital information literacy,
developing capacity and capability in our own library staff to address the barriers
identified by the DIAL project:
1) Ensuring students and staff perceive the relevance of a range of digital literacies to
their own professional and personal lives, so they are motivated to explore and
experiment, activities which are essential to maintaining currency
2) Sustaining change cost effectively
3) Providing training and development in a context where skills and experience vary
enormously within and between groups of students and staff, and where existing
skills are hard to diagnose efficiently and accurately.
We want to find ways to harness the knowledge and enthusiasm of early adopters in
Library Services as well as to support staff who want to develop skills further, and to
provide a forum for discussion on incorporating digital tools into our practice: this will
then enhance the ways in which we support and engage with our users.
We are working to understand our current levels of skills, and the areas we want to
develop. We are looking at ways of doing this – using the 23 things approach as an
inspiration and starting point – to move to things unlimited – a flexible, open, online
digital information literacy resource.
The paper presents our work in progress.