Information Literacy Research: Dimensions of the Emerging Collective Consciousness

Information literacy researchers are beginning to develop a collective consciousness, a consciousness that represents the newly appearing territory of information literacy research. This paper analyses the information literacy research territory as it is represented by the emerging collective consciousness of information literacy researchers. Five dimensions of the collective consciousness are proposed: 1) the sectoral location of the research; 2) ways of seeing information literacy; 3) ‘what’ is being investigated, that is the research object; 4) ‘how’ the object is being investigated, that is the research approaches and paradigms; and 5) disciplinary influences. These dimensions are used to: 1) reveal the character of the information literacy research territory which is in early stages of construction; 2) show how different kinds of research approaches can shed different kinds of light on the object of research; and 3) demonstrate how the five dimensions work together in the development of new studies.