Perception of Information Literacy Among Faculty at the University of Graz, Tallinn University, and University of Zagreb

Abstract

The way university academic staff perceive, promote, and practice information literacy (IL) becomes a topic of great importance to IL education. The tendency towards IL education as an integrated or embedded part of the curriculum and curriculum design where students have ongoing interaction and reflection with information, give academic staff an increasingly important role. A semi-structured interview was used as a method of collecting data on the perception of IL among academic staff at three universities in Europe. The following aspects of IL were explored: awareness of IL, attitudes towards IL, motivation for IL facilitation, IL experiences and IL requirements expected from students. Since the interviewed academics were from three different disciplines (business administration, information science, information systems), subject related differences in the perceptions of IL were investigated.