SLIS Assistant Professor Joan Beaudoin will speak at the WSU Humanities Center Brown Bag Colloquium:
A Case Study of Visual Literacy among Library and Information Science Students
Abstract: It is widely acknowledged that we live in a increasingly visual world and yet knowledge concerning visual information continues to lag behind that of the printed or spoken word among the general population. This new visual paradigm, driven in large part by technological developments enabling the easy exchange and display of images, has brought into sharper focus the lack of knowledge and training concerning visual information. As access to visual information is largely dependent on the descriptive information associated with an image, there is a critical need to perform this work well. This study examines the development of visual literacy skills among library and information science students. Their progress is traced through a series of exercises and learning tools developed to increase their understanding of visual information and the unique challenges of producing descriptive metadata for images. The findings of the study point to several general patterns of visual literacy development as well as revealing the high degree of frustration experienced by the students in their attempts to perform the work.