As is the case every year, I like to post something on Eleanor’s birthday. Last year, I gave a talk about her life at the wonderful National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, which you can watch, if yo…

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An in-depth look at how Francis Crozier ended up with his name and career

LILAC is an annual conference covering all aspects of information literacy and is a firm favourite in the calendar of information professionals. The conference is brimming with new ideas, innovative…

London auction house says it would be wonderful if an Irish institution acquired the Kilkea native’s silverware

This is Sheila liveblogging again from the ECIL conference on Generative Artificial Intelligence Skills in Schools: “It is an intelligence that is not natural, but it is created by a different intelligent form of life” presented by Konstantina Martzoukou (co-authored Chinedu Pascal Ezenkwu) (Robert Gordon University, UK). The project involved supporting young people to find and generate material on important issues related to the Sustainable Development Goals. There is an article about the project here. The young people used AI to generate the material. The first objective was to adopt a cartoon character and identify what prompts the character would use, also the children relected on whether their character would know how gen AI worked. On the basis of this data the researchers created a toolkit with lesson plans, learning activities and curated external reources. Material was exchanged and created by the young people via focus groups. The young people were 12-13, creating material for 9-10 year olds. The students could critique the images and text generated. Martzoukou talked about the cartoon characters including Eco Hey-Aye, the first AI teacher in a school. Then the material co-created with young people and the young people's reflections on AI and AI-created material was translated into storytelling, and again Martzoukou gave some examples. She went on to describe some of the teaching material (including games) they have created and the videos that were produced. The videos (part of the Maddie is online series) are here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlUx8jQ1MCcRtHt888BoOyQP54HWH6UqC They were voiced by teachers, librarians and students. The toolkit can be downloaded from the Maddie is Online website: https://www.maddiesonline.com/

 Pam McKinney continuing live-blogging from the ECIL conference. This presentation was from Ane Landoy from the Norwegian Directorate for HE, working with Karin Cecilia and Alexandra Rydving. They looked at the institutional response to defining AI competencies on 6 Higher Education websites, targeting both students and academic staff. For example, at the University of Oslo they found many examples of information aimed at both staff and students on how to use AI in teaching and learning. The two older and larger universities had adopted a more comprehensive approaoch to AI use, but the other institutions had information, but fewer competence-building activity. They also looked at the role of the libraries, and most had some content covering AI use as part of the generic IL teaching offer. In March 2025 the government appointed a working group in the university sector to look at the challenges of AI use. The research points to a lack of funding, time and other resources to develop practice around AI use in universities.

This is Sheila liveblogging from the ECIL Conference again on Faculty Views on Generative AI Tools – Case: Primo Research Assistant, presented by Riikka Sinisalo and Essi Prykäri (LUT University, Finland). They explained that PRIMO research assistant provides a summary of 5 articles with the inline references. Users can ask questions in languages other than English and it does machine translations. They have renamed the tool as "AI Assistant". The library did a survey about Primo Research Assistant with faculty, with only 26 respondents. Most people agreed it was easy to use, a majority agreed that it would be useful for their own work, and that it would be useful for students. In open ended questions revealed that faculty that most would recommend the tool to the student and most had tested other AI tools. Other comments included stating that using AI searching needed support and that there was question whether poor results were a problem of the searcher or the tool. Respondents emphasised that students need to read articles, do summaries and be critical - so if learners are too reliant on AI tools they will not develop this understanding themselves. Also respondents noted that it was unclear how the articles were chosen. To follow up on this they interviewed four faculty members. The themes echoed what was said in the survey. The AI Tool was seen as useful for quick or starting searches, but more thorough search would be needed. The follow up quesries which are generated by the AI Tools were seen as useful. Having just 5 articles was seen as useful in an age of information overload. The interviewees noted that some essential sources were missed by the tool, Finnish sources were neglected, and translations English-Finnish had some problems. There were concerns about "outsourcing" information searching - outsourcing cognitive functions that people need to develop. There were discussion as to who should teach AI skills - librarians? or would it just be just picked up? The interviewees had not so many concerns about students using summaries directly in their work - they were more worried about other researchers doing so. The library launched the tool in mid-August 2025, and so far it is used less than basic search but more than advanced search. The librarians think they need to provide more information on limitations, features such as machine translation (and problems with searching in Finnish), and on biases etc. They finished with a quote from a respondenet  "AI is here to stay, so there's no point pretending that we could continue business as usual going forward"

Pam McKinney here, continuing the live-blogging from the ECIL conference. This presentation was from Monika Krakowska, Magdalena Zych from Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland, the lovely location for the ECIL conference in 2023. Monika and Magdalena spoke about their research to understand ethical IL literacy in Higher Education. They wanted to diagnose LIS students' practices in working with Gen AI, and the gaps in students' real-world practices and the ACRL framework for IL. The research questions focused on how students understand authorship and disclosers of AI text production, how they assess the credibility of AI-generated responses and how criticality manifests in AI use. They used selected ACRL frames: information has value, authority is constructed and contextual; research as inquiry and searching as strategic exploration, and tried to understand how they could be reinterpreted in the context of GenAI.  84 LIS students at various levels of education took part in the research, they had to choose one of three tasks with ethical AI use dilemmas, modelling three roles: science fiction writer, information broker and podcast creator (e.g. analyse the consequences of using AI in video games). The team analysed the chat log from students' interactions with ChatGPT, and analysed this thematically, using the ACRL frames to support coding. Students mostly did not acknowledge the authorship of ChatGPT, did not question the credibility of the information provided by the AI, and did not identify bias. There was little iterative, purposeful prompting and searching, the prompt engineering was not very successful. Simple single-step requests/prompts dominated the chat logs, and usually focused on the format of the responses rather than the content.  In terms of the ACRL framework, they found that there was a need to examine AI use and how the ACRL framework could be updated and developed. Coming from the research are three central points: the need to recognise non-human contribution, bias and hallucination literacy is needed and prompt engineering competency is needed. The research took place in one university and there is an appetite for extending this to other universities. Future-ready IL must be AI-aware, AI-critical and AI-responsible. Photo: rainy Monday morning in Bamberg (Pam McKinney)

My 2nd liveblog from the ECIL conference is A Transdisciplinary Course on AI Literacy: From Concept to Reality authored by Anna C. Véron, Marco E. Weber, Gary Seitz (University of Zurich, Switzerland) and presented by Véron and Weber. Three groups were involved in its development: School of Transdisciplinary Stdents, the Digital Society Inititiative and the Library (Open Science section) (all at the University of Zurich). They already worked togther on teaching, and in 2023 they decided they needed a ChatGPT course, which was launched and then responsibility given to the library. The name was ChatGPT and Beyond: Interdisciplinary approaches to AI literacy. Here is the link to description. There were 9 sessions, aiming to get a muliangled view of AI, including impact on impact on creators, legal issues, AI analysis of text, applications in medicine & health and critical AI literacy. Contributors came from various departments. The library was the organiser and also had a session on AI-supported literature research and led the session on critical AI literacy. The module is credit bearing. They had to demonstrate active participation (80%) and a portfolio. The portfolio included selecting an application scenario (e.g. writing a paper, creating educational material for others), selecting an AI tool appropriate to the scenario (and explaining the application and issues), and the learners also had to critical reflect on their understanding. The learner had to include a narrated screencast of their interaction with their chosen AI tool. Expected benefits that students mentioned in their portfolio included saving time, improved quality, improved understanding and improved performance. The presenters mentioned that the students were mostly not native speakers in either German or English. ChatGPT was the chosen AI tool of about half the students. This is an example portfolio https://drive.switch.ch/index.php/s/YdNehkm4dAkhOmu Students were asked what to lose, add, and have less or more of (sorry, this was shown briefly and I couldn't catch what the comments were). Photo by Sheila Webber: courtyard by Bamberg Cathedral, September 2025

 Hi everyone, I'm Pam McKinney and I'm helping Sheila live-blog from the ECIL conference this week. The first presentation I'm attending is Information Literacy and Artificial Intelligence: A Library and Information Science Perspective on Effects, Research Questions, Challenges and Opportunities by Joachim Griesbaum, Stefan Dreisiebner, Antje Michel, Inka Tappenbeck, Anke Wittich from various universities in Germany. They spoke about a workshop they developed on information literacy and artificial intelligence that aimed to connect information scientists and librarians to explore the IL challenges associated with the use of AI. They had some highly intensive discussions over a full day based on position papers written by experts. They created a synthesis of the position papers and this has now been published in german (Dreisiebner et al 2024 Implikationen von generativen KI-Systemen für die Informationskompetenz-Vermittlung English version). They did some qualitative thematic analysis of the position papers and presented a "short glimpse" of the results in this presentation. They spoke about 3 clusters: the impact of AI on existing concepts of information literacy, the impact of AI on information science research in the field of IL and the challenges and opportunities in the promotion of IL through AI. They were concerned with the actions of students and tutors, and the role of the library in this space.  Key areas of research will be the transformation of information markets, the impact of AI on information behaviour, information ethics and the integration of AI into education. They pose the question: Are existing IL frameworks suitable to cover AI-specific competencies, and how we can develop AI-specific education?Picture: A brewery in Bamberg (Pam McKinney)

Critical Arctic Studies Symposium 2025

While transcribing William Porden’s 1818 travel journal, I came across some details, in which he revealed how the officials at the customs house in Calais described him in his passport. I found it …

Welcome to the second Fitzjames newsletter, in which we examine the reception of the news of the identification of Fitzjames' remains by the media & fandom. Plus a detailed update on my research!

Last week I wrote a special post dedicated to Eleanor Porden’s death, two hundred years ago, on 22 February 1825. Today, 1 March, marks the two-hundredth anniversary of her funeral. It is also the …

Explore and discover archive collections across Scotland

At 7 p.m. on 22 April 1825 the Arctic explorer John Franklin received the tragic news of the death of his first wife Eleanor. He was then at Penetanguishene on the shore of Lake Huron, now in  the …

Portrait of Eleanor Anne Porden, by Richard Westall Exactly two hundred years ago today, on 22 February 1825, Eleanor Anne Franklin (née Porden) died in the same house – 55 Devonshire Street,…

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The Hall of Clestrain has fallen into disrepair, but the John Rae Society is taking radical steps to transform the building to its former glory.

The Hall of Clestrain has fallen into disrepair, but the John Rae Society is taking radical steps to transform the building to its former glory.