Information and Media Literacy workshop

. In April 2013 in Uzice, the workshop Training the Trainers in Information Literacy was held for librarians from Central Serbia. The speaker was a professor Albert Boekhorst, UNESCO expert and a member of IFLA Information literacy section.

The participation was by invitation as recognition of the achievements that the Public Library Radislav Nikcevic has had in recent years- development of information and communication technologies and affirmation of library and information profession in the country and abroad. A good knowledge of English was necessary for participation in the workshop because it was held in English. Our representative was Ivana Pesic, a coordinator of the project AgroLib Ja.

Participation in this prestigious seminar was a good starting point for the Jagodina Library to organize a workshop of the same model in order to enhance information and media literacy of librarians in public, school and village libraries.

The seminar-workshop Information and Media Literacy was hosted by the Jagodina Public Library on 17 October. The participants were librarians from Jagodina, Rekovac, Despotovac, Cuprija, and from secondary schools as well as village libraries, a total of sixteen of them.

 The workshop consisted of three one-hour blocks. First, they had theoretical work and then practical work. Discussions during the practice were very constructive and librarians shared experiences and ideas from their own libraries. In the first part we talked about the concept of information and media literacy, which meant definition, how to become IT literate, and literature to study this area.  Then we talked about social networks and their use. In the second part we discussed the mission and vision of the library, so we could talk in the third part about guidelines for introducing information and media literacy in libraries. After each segment, the participants were able to do the exercise in the context of their own libraries and to talk about that in order to highlight problems in their libraries.  It was a challenge for me as a leader of this workshop to have different types of participants.

After the completion of the training, all participants were given certificates for successful participation in the workshop Information and Media Literacy.

It was not easy to organize the workshop and I had to wait for a couple of months for some colleagues to confirm their participation. Also, I waited for some colleagues to confirm who will represent their libraries; therefore, I did not give them preparatory exercises. One more reason for not giving them preparatory exercises was that there was no possibility to buy books used for the research in this area, so they could not find tips how to do the exercises. As it is probably known, in Serbia libraries have not been purchasing books due to the complicated procurement procedures, so the libraries were not obliged to have these books.