• Priority Area Media and Information Literacy for Citizens Empowerment
• Year 2024, 2025
• Country Ireland, Portugal, Spain
• Project Status Ongoing

MIL Community Connections (MIL CC) aims to tackle three major challenges faced by public libraries today: 1) librarians often lack Media and Information Literacy (MIL) training and crucial skills, especially in the age of generative AI; 2) despite the availability of high-quality, free-to-use MIL resources, most are not tailored to the specific needs of libraries and their patrons; 3) library structures and community contexts vary greatly across Europe, yet MIL resources are often created without considering issues of translation and adaptation.

To address these challenges, MIL CC offers a hybrid course for librarians, designed and implemented by Learn to Check (Spain), involving librarians and local community members, including teenagers, adults, and elderly people. Initially in Catalan, the course will be translated into English, Portuguese, and Spanish, and will be updated and improved based on the results of a 2023 Irish pilot community training program aimed to empower teachers, librarians, and community leaders to deliver MIL workshops within their communities.

Through the MIL CC course, 150 librarians will develop community MIL projects tailored to specific contexts. They will also design, implement, and evaluate MIL activities, establishing a set of best practices. Standards for course implementation and project creation will be established and validated by national supporting partners and an international expert consultation group, using a co-design methodology.

All training materials and standards will be published under a Creative Commons license and extensively promoted through existing networks (e.g., EDMO) and a network of interconnected libraries, one of the key outcomes of MIL CC.