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“GoodYarn” is a skills-based workshop that focusses on building mental health literacy in rural communities, members of which are known to experience geographic, attitudinal and service configuration barriers to accessing mental health services. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact of the GoodYarn project on raising mental health literacy in the rural community.

GoodYarn is primarily for farmers, their families and farm workers, as well as the “farmer facing” workforce. The focus on mental health literacy aligns with the mental health promotion approach of using methods that foster supportive environments. By raising the mental health literacy of those not directly needing help, but in positions to help those that do – such as employers, rural professionals and rural support industries who are well placed to perceive stressors in farmers – GoodYarn builds a community with the knowledge and skills to identify and approach those experiencing mental distress or illness, and direct them to appropriate support and services. All participants in the GoodYarn workshops (n=430) were invited to complete a questionnaire at the end of the workshop. All participants answered the questionnaire, with over 80 per cent answering all questions.

Participant feedback affirmed the utility of GoodYarn as an effective vehicle to facilitate the discussion of mental illness in rural farming communities of New Zealand. GoodYarn had a significant positive impact on the three immediate workshop indicators of awareness, confidence and knowledge (p<0.001 for all three indicators). Further, the high level of concordance in workshop outcomes across various organisations’ delivery indicates programme consistency and quality has been maintained throughout the upscaling of the programme.

The uptake of the GoodYarn programme by rural organisations and communities at a national level, and the positive evaluation results, provide encouragement that building mental health literacy in the rural workforce is a promising mental health promotion strategy.

Many of today’s information and technology systems and environments facilitate inquiry, learning, consciousness-raising and knowledge-building. Such platforms include e-learning systems which have learning, education and/or training as explicit goals or objectives. They also include search engines, social media platforms, video-sharing platforms, and knowledge sharing environments deployed for work, leisure, inquiry, and personal and professional productivity. The new journal, Information and Learning Sciences, aims to advance our understanding of human inquiry, learning and knowledge-building across such information, e-learning, and socio-technical system contexts.

This article introduces the journal at its launch under new editorship in January, 2019. The article, authored by the journal co-editors and all associate editors, explores the lineage of scholarly undertakings that have contributed to the journal's new scope and mission, which includes past and ongoing scholarship in the following arenas: Digital Youth, Constructionism, Mutually Constitutive Ties in Information and Learning Sciences, and Searching-as-Learning.

The article offers examples of ways in which the two fields stand to enrich each other towards a greater holistic advancement of scholarship. The article also summarizes the inaugural special issue contents from the following contributors: Caroline Haythornthwaite; Krista Glazewski and Cindy Hmelo-Silver; Stephanie Teasley; Gary Marchionini; Caroline R. Pitt; Adam Bell, Rose Strickman and Katie Davis; Denise Agosto; Nicole Cooke; and Victor Lee.

The article, this special issue, and the journal in full, are among the first formal and ongoing publication outlets to deliberately draw together and facilitate cross-disciplinary scholarship at this integral nexus. We enthusiastically and warmly invite continued engagement along these lines in the journal’s pages, and also welcome related, and wholly contrary points of view, and points of departure that may build upon or debate some of the themes we raise in the introduction and special issue contents.