TUNE enters a new phase
11th January 2005
The first phase of the TUNE project, the Development Phase, has come to its end. During this time the members of the Management Team and the members of the Working Group have met twice, in Toledo and in Helsingborg, establishing this way the bases of what will have to be the work of the following phase, the Training and Practicing Phase. The labors fulfilled during these three months have been essentially the analysis of population and libraries statistics in each of the social contexts, the establishment of a draft training model and the selection of users target groups to test this model.
From this statistical analysis it have been deduced that exist notable differences among the three countries in the use and the public image of the libraries, the Internet penetration at homes and the literacy in the use of information technologies. In Spain almost the 20% of population has a public library card, though in our more local area the figures are better enough: in Castilla-La Mancha reaches 32 % and in the city of Toledo, 43 %. The figures of per capita loans in one year do not reach to 0,9 in Spain, though here also the local figures are better: 2,13 in Castilla-La Mancha and 4,2 in Toledo.
The penetration of the information technologies is also considerably lower in Spain than in other European countries: only 43% of the Spanish homes have personal computer and only the 25% have access to Internet. In this case the figures of Castilla-La Mancha are worse, since only 39% of the homes has a computer and 15%, access to Internet. We should take these and other considerations in mind when we will program the target groups, contents and methodology of the training sessions.
At the same time as this developed model is tested in all three implied libraries, the training phase will serve us as point for a reflection on the capacities and pedagogic needs of the librarians to fulfill these activities. In Spain the university students of librarianship and documentation receive a scanty formation in questions tied to the necessary skills to analyze, to advise and to form users and clients of the information units (libraries, documentation centers, archives, etc). The questions related to the information users almost does not appear in the curricula, and when they do it, they are more focused on the studies of evaluation of users' satisfaction that in training users in strict sense.
But the users’ training is not an unknown matter in Spanish public libraries. For years many public libraries have been doing activities of users' training, but also it is true that they have been almost always centered on the traditional use of the library, its resources and services. Only very recently an approach more related with the “information literacy” has appeared in some cases, with the development on the part of the citizens of information skills that allow them to identify their own informative needs and to solve them by means of the identification, location, evaluation, organization, use and communication of the information that they can need; an approach that inserts the library as center of resources and diffusion of the information inside the whole set of information nowadays accessibly. This it is the way that we want to explore with TUNE project, doing of the practice the end of the reflection and of the cooperation the base of our task.
Joaquín Selgas and Javier Docampo
Castilla-La Mancha Library Management Team
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