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So what is transliteracy? I had never heard of the phrase which originated in communication and cultural studies with a major exponent being Sue Thomas, a professor of new media who heads the Production and Research in Transliteracy group at De Montfort University in Leicester. Transliteracy she says is ‘the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks’. Mariis Mills, a Danish PhD student explains: “ Transliteracy can be characterized as:

• a possible unifying perspective on what it means to be literate in the twenty-first century

• an extension of transliteration that also includes the increasingly wide range of communication platforms and tools at our disposal

• a concept that calls for a change of perspective away from the battles over print versus digital, and a move instead towards a unifying ecology not just of media, but of all literacies relevant to reading, writing, interaction and culture, both past and present...”

Susie took us through a series of interviews she conducted for a paper she presented at the IFLA conference in 2009. Most people she interviewed hadn’t heard of transliteracy either but found themselves as practitioners even if their workplaces weren’t as keen to take up new media or web 2.0 technologies as they were.

So is transliteracy just about new media? Transliteracy it was argued (and please do argue with me here) goes beyond literacy as it is almost like a behaviour so instead of having a written text to examine and disseminate it is storytelling, it is encouraging people to interact with a blog, not just writing it. It is using new forms of language, the much maligned text speak or should that be txt sp?!

Is it helpful to label it thus if transliteracy is just engaging with technology? Some speakers argued that labelling means giving something significance and importance and that perhaps being transliterate should be on library school curricula. Often people push a technology before they have decided rightly or wrongly to use it or else sometimes people hide behind a technology and the unknown as an excuse to not engage with it: I’ll lose my privacy, my corporate identity is at risk, where is my data being transmitted to...

We touched on the buzzwords we’re perhaps all more familiar with such as the Google generation and the work of David Nicholas. Is it really about age or generations and has anything really changed -as with letters there is etiquette just as with Google chat there is etiquette...so perhaps we are just dealing with change but on a more rapid scale. Does going beyond literacy mean we are going beyond meaning and transliteracy leads to nonsense?

One speaker feared that the face to face interaction as a communicative form was losing out to teleconferencing (essential in my own work) and web chat (through which Susie conducted one of her interviews). New technologies also bring about opportunities to connect with people that would never happen in real life such as the Kmers who have regular online chats and provide a valuable forum for all those interested in KM on a global scale.

Finally a speaker noted how just as the lines were being blurred between musicians and music producers and artists and writers perhaps in information circles we are feeling our way in a landscape which blurs the lines between content producer, consumer and manager. As transliterati it is the decision to engage that defines us and whether that means librarians or info pros play the role of facilitators or just bit players like everyone else it certainly was an interesting debate.