Evaluating the impact of information literacy in higher education: Progress and prospects

The past few years in higher education have seen a growing interest by library staff in information literacy interventions focussed on students and, more recently, on postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers. A separate but parallel growth has seen a shift from traditional service evaluation us-ing quantitative performance indicators towards impact evaluation employing a range of methods but relying heavily on qualitative approaches. This shift might be characterised as an increase in emphasis on the effectiveness rather than just the effi ciency of library services. What do we mean by information literacy? The SCONUL website offers a defi nition from their Working Group on Information: Information literacy encompasses library user education, information skills training and education, and those areas of personal, transferable or ‘key ’ skills relating to the use and manipulation of information in the context of learn-ing, teaching and research issues in higher education. [1] This defi nition has the merit of ‘rounding up ’ a range of areas of greater or lesser interest for HE library staff into a single area of concern which are also of growing interest to academic colleagues. Turning to the concept of impact, our preferred variation amongst many similar statements is: … any effect of the service (or of an event or initiative) on an individual or group. The impact may be positive or negative (it is as important to know what is not working as well a