In the information explosion of today’s world, it is impossible to teach learners all they need to know. The best instructors can do is to place learners in a position where they can easily and effectively access the information they require to learn what they need to know at the time they need to know it. Information literacy is therefore, a useful skill required in all fields where access to timely information is needed to make informed decisions and to achieve success in strategic directions. However, effective application of this all important skill can be hard to achieve, especially at the higher education level. The need to provide appropriate information literacy training for people to understand best practices can therefore, not be over emphasised. As a result, dynamic, service-oriented librarians constantly seek ideas to improve and promote their services. This is particularly true of Academic librarians who strive to help students develop good research and critical thinking skills, but are often hindered by short instruction sessions and limited time with students who need help most.
It is for these reasons that Patrick Ragains and Sandra M. Wood’s edited book, The New Information Literacy Instruction: Best Practices is highly recommended for every Instructional Librarian in particular, and library and information professionals generally, who study pedagogy and share and absorb both time-tested and new practices through various platforms. The book is also very useful for the new digital librarian who seeks to understand their profile and pursue an effective portfolio in this Google era.
The book is structured into three main parts with 13 sections covering the most contemporary issues in information literacy teaching. The first seven sections are fully explored by respected information literacy researchers (instruction, communication, health science and government information librarians), to provide insight into how to support specific academic programmes and to provide understanding of innovative models for information literacy instruction. The remaining six sections explore the teaching of special literacies from other fields, which help define and profile competencies and skills for the modern instructional digital librarian. Experts from various fields are drawn on to discuss special literacy ideas including visual literacy, how to support information and scientific literacy, how to develop data fluency, teaching special literacy, how to identify best practices for teaching with primary resources and how to digitise history to bring it to a wider audience.
The presence of multiple authors who bring their expertise to discuss pertinent and current issues in modern information literacy instruction discourse adds a special value to the central idea of the book. The tone of the book is conversational and reflective, making it easy for readers to construct their own learning within the Association of College and Research Libraries Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.
The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand
© 2016 Eric Boamah
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00049670.2016.1250615