This text is about the shift in focus from the resources to the student – about moving away from simply instructing students in locating and using resources and moving towards equipping students with lifelong learning skills, creating critical thinkers and providing individual students with a higher quality student experience. The Personal Librarian details a programme, or concept, for librarians to follow to achieve a more comprehensive version of information literacy delivery. It is not advocating a change in approach by librarians, but rather that librarians consider repackaging the service they provide in a more meaningful, targeted way. The American Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education clearly underpin this new approach. Nevertheless, it can still be easily applied within the Australian library industry.
The concept builds on the idea of the embedded librarian, but goes beyond that. Instead of encouraging librarians to focus only on collaboration between themselves and academic staff, this text discusses how the liaison librarian can and should work towards building similar long-term ‘personal’ relationships with individual students over the entire period of a student’s degree programme. Such relationships are intended to provide students with the confidence and ability to seek for information independently and should also provide them with an ongoing and approachable means of support.
The chapters of this collection are arranged in a logical order and serve to scaffold the concepts covered in an extremely well-organised and clear manner. Context and background are provided in earlier chapters, as well as detail on the development and case studies of implementation of the personal librarian concept. Further chapters discuss how it relates to information literacy, embedded librarianship and the academic library environment. Later chapters incorporate a ‘real-world’ perspective in that they provide relevant insight from businesses and other academic service areas and cleverly include a ‘faculty perspective’ on the personal librarian.
Overall I found this book to be clever and insightful. I would recommend this text, particularly the checklist and best practice chapters, to academic librarians and any other librarians.
RMIT University
© 2015 Wendy Frerichs
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00049670.2015.1100278