In 2023, a small team at Hibernia College, composed of library staff and the digital learning department researcher, took the initiative to develop an online asynchronous digital literacy course for the college and wider community. This poster will address the rationale, process and outcomes of developing the digital literacy course. The availability of the course as an OER will be discussed, highlighting our interest in contributing to digital citizenship and the SDGs. The poster will also highlight some possible future directions that could develop and build on the work done to date. The poster was presented at the CILIP Ireland/LAI Annual Joint Conference held in Newry, from Wednesday 24th April to Thursday 25th April 2024. It was also presented at the ILTA EdTech Conference held in Sligo, from 30th May to 31st May 2024. It won Best Poster at the CONUL Conference held in Belfast, from Wednesday 29th May - Thursday 30th May 2024.

“I believe virtually everything I read, and I think that is what makes me more of a selective human than someone who doesn't believe anything.” (David St Hubbins) Approaching life like David St Hubbins from This Is Spinal Tap (1984) was all very well back in the 1980s, but it is a less good idea in today’s internet-dominated interconnected world, where anyone with a phone can publish anything and beam it around the world. Critically assessing the integrity of information has never been more important or more challenging, and to do this successfully requires digital literacy skills. Inspired by global initiatives such as the United Nations SDGs and the European Commission’s DigComp framework, we created an open digital educational resource to help foster digital literacy within our institution and beyond. This project ties in with an ongoing academic integrity project within our institution; it also coincides with the increasing availability of generative artificial intelligence systems that can potentially spread misinformation at scale. In this context, we feel the project is a very timely one. In this paper, we reflect on the process of developing the course, share what we have learned along the way, and indicate future directions for the project.

Developing faculty and staff engagement with a new open-access institutional repository (IR) is a challenge often underestimated during IR implementation projects. The idea that “if you build it, they will come” does not reflect the reality of establishing a successful IR in a third-level institution (Ferreira et al., 2008). Factors that hinder the adoption of open-access IRs are many and varied, and a multi-pronged approach is required both to gain an understanding of these factors and develop a strategy to address them (Narayan and Luca, 2017; Tmava, 2022). For those involved in IR implementation projects, having surmounted the considerable hurdles of securing approval and funding for an IR and then developing the platform, the need for the development of such a strategy often comes as quite a surprise. However, it is arguably the most important part of ensuring a successful IR implementation. In this presentation, the genesis and continuing evolution our own IR engagement strategy will be reflected upon and our learnings shared for the benefit of those at a similar or earlier stage of the open-access IR journey. Crucial to our professional journey has been the process of replacing the hubristic “if you build it” metaphor with one suggesting a more incremental and infinitely less glamorous approach to the problem. Inspired by a popular television series (Crook, 2014-2022), we reflect on the role of IR administrators less as architects and more as detectorists. Informed by the reflective model of Experience, Reflection, Action (Jasper, 2013) and guided by Holliday’s (2017) thinking on the power of metaphor in theory and practice, we present a story of lofty idealism giving way to scuttling skullduggery; of the painful metaphorical journey from building a magnificent baseball stadium to squelching through a muddy field with a metal detector. It is also a story of how we were (almost) desperate enough to dress up in fish onesies and jump into the Liffey.

Poster presented at the LAI/CILIP Joint Annual Conference 2023

Poster presented at IFLA WLIC in Dublin 26th to 29th July 2022.

In Hibernia College, students are expected to take primary responsibility for maintaining academic integrity in their studies. However, lecturers and support staff have an important role to play in educating students about academic integrity and helping them develop the skills needed to practise it. This paper describes a project initiated by the Digital Learning Department (DLD) to improve the College’s online referencing supports, in response to the high volume of referencing queries being received daily by the Digital Librarian. Recent changes to the focus of capstone research projects on the PME programmes, combined with the move to fully online instruction during the Covid-19 pandemic, further highlighted the urgency of ensuring that these resources met students’ needs. The project consisted of a comprehensive update of the College’s core Referencing Guide and the delivery of a series of drop-in webinar workshops where referencing queries from students could be dealt with directly and specific problem areas addressed. The paper outlines the principles informing both the updating of the Referencing Guide and the structure of the online workshops. A preliminary analysis of library logs and student feedback survey data provides early indications of student engagement with and responses to these new supports.

This presentation details a migration project from PDF reading lists to online reading list software. The project was carried out by library staff at Hibernia College beginning in Autumn 2021.