VERITY – Virtual and Electronic Resources for Information Skills Training for Young People

Project Coordinator and Partners

The consortium headed by Information Services at the University of Sunderland comprises the University of Helsinki IT Centre for Schools, Stuttgart Public Libraries, Athens College Library and ISEGI based at the New University of Lisbon. The project was funded by the Libraries sector under the European Union's Telematics Applications Programme. 

Background

The Verity project is connected with the idea of providing virtual library services that are creative, stimulating and educational for young people. Teaching the youth how to search and use information is compatible with concept of lifelong learning for information society. 

Core Objectives

The main aim of project was to help young people with their information seeking process by providing them "The Virtual librarian" system. The system provided virtual library services and tough students how to be independent learners in the information society. 

Details

The target group for the project were young people aged 13-19. The Verity project first produced an English prototype of "The Virtual librarian" system called “Virtual Resource Finder” which had two parts: the resource finder and the infoskill s. The resource finder guides users through a series of options that assist them in locating the correct bibliographic information both in the OPAC and from a database of selected web resources.

Infoskills includes three sections:

• Learning material;
  A guide for information seeking designed for school assignment and project work. It teaches the user how to work effectively with information. 

• Self-evaluation questionnaire
  The questionnaire provides a forty five questions questionnaire users can take to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses in searching.
   
• Teacher’s guide
  The guide  discusses the challenges of the future education and offers guidance in encouraging collaborative work. 

On the completion and verification of the first prototype in English additional prototypes were also produced in Finnish, German, Greek and Portuguese. 

Results

The project, which was finished in 2000:

• supported young people with their research projects in retrieving, selecting and evaluating the relevant information available in library catalogues and on the Internet;
• contributed to the spread of the idea of lifelong learning;
• gave young people the ability to learn independently