The concept of literacy has become more multi-faceted and complex as technology, pedagogy and social consciousness have progressed. Just being able to read and write in one language is no longer sufficient in today’s society and workplace. Today it’s widely acknowledged that there are multiple literacies and literacies are not necessarily universal, but contextual to geographies, societies, and environment (e.g. workplace, academia, school).

Moreover, many types of literacies overlap with each other, or are subsets of another literacy. For instance, social media literacy overlaps a great deal with digital literacy, since social media is almost always in a digital format, and requires a certain level of knowledge of digital privacy and security to safely navigate. Digital literacy and information literacy overlap a great deal, especially since so much data and information is available in databases and online platforms today. Knowing how to interact with digital interfaces, conduct searches effectively, and how to connect different digital content together (e.g. exporting citations from a database to a citation manager, then inserting the citation to a document) are essential skills for students and academics.

As a librarian, I am inclined to use information literacy as an overall umbrella term, and other literacies as mostly subsets of information literacy. And the number of literacies have continued to grow over time, due to advances in technology, but also due to social, economic, political and environmental changes in this VUCA world. Learners have to be more savvy about more issues today to stay safe and informed online, in this period of misinformation, scams, data scraping, sale of personal information between companies and so on. Educators should not only ensure that learners have access to the information they need, but that learners know how to judge if the information they come across is accurate, reliable and relevant. And not just young people have to acquire literacy skills – mature learners and researchers may also require help in improving their digital literacy, such as social responsibility in research.

I am now exploring various tools to create assessment and self-help tests for digital literacy, such as Qualtrics, Poll Everywhere and Microsoft Forms, as these have lower learning curves and require less training to familiarise my colleagues. We are looking into using H5P and other tools in the longer term to create more complex and interactive assessments. As the university has over 42 thousand students and 12 thousand staff, it is impossible for the library to personally guide every person through a digital literacy journey, so alternatives have to be sought for self-help and asynchronous teaching. Eventually I hope that the library will have a comprehensive toolkit of resources and assessment to help every student and staff improve in digital literacy in all aspects.