Mann Supports International Information Literacy
Making high-quality information resources in the agricultural sciences widely available has a major role to play in finding solutions to food insecurity. Ensuring that researchers are able and ready to access those resources is also a key part of the puzzle. To that end, last December librarians from Mann conferred with some 65 counterparts from India and Africa in India at a workshop on information literacy. The workshop, "Strengthening the Academic Library to Enhance Agriculture Education," focused on e-resource collection development, digitization of library collections, information literacy, library public computing and support for e-learning.
The workshop is an early outcome of collaboration taking place between Mann Library and Banaras Hindu University (BHU) Library in Varanasi, India, which in turn has been an outgrowth of the Agricultural Innovation Partnership (AIP). Established with USAID funding in February 2011, AIP is a consortium of state agricultural universities in India and five land-grant universities in the U.S. formed to strengthen the capacity of state agricultural universities. The consortium also aims to develop and pilot innovative extension models that will improve the expertise of agricultural graduates in providing management and agri-technology support to farmers making the transition from subsistence farming. The AIP consortium is led by the Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Banaras Hindu University (BHU) and Cornell University International Programs based at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
Since April 2011, Mann Library and the Banaras Hindu University Library have been developing a plan to help support libraries in the institutions involved in the AIP consortium. The plan will focus on sharing expertise in managing digital information resources—an area of particular strength for Mann Library— in order to expand active cyber literacy skills widely in the research, extension and farming communities. The next step after the December 2011 workshop in Banaras: Librarians from India will soon be coming to Cornell to enhance their information linkages and knowledge. For more information about the December workshop and the AIP consortium, please see full Cornell Chronicle article.