Since the term “information literacy” made its popular appearance in the early 1990s, it has been used to embrace an increasingly wide variety of skills and concepts. While the term had been coined in 1974 by Paul Zurkowski (Lloyd and Talja, 2010), it took the best part of 20 years to become a popular part of the information provision landscape. One part of the “new literacies” that developed in the 1990s (Street, 1995; New London Group, 1996; Cope and Kalantzis, 1999), the concept consolidated during that time to most frequently be seen as an acquirable set of skills generally transmitted by library and information professionals. Formal lessons were planned and presented using normal teaching technologies in libraries all around the world.
By the close of the old millennium and the start of the new a number of individuals were exploring a much wider conception of information literacy. Personal and social needs were seen to be just as vital in the specific workplace environment as they were in the classroom and the term information society began to embrace aspects of a wider information literacy that was learned “on the job”. Bringing with it a diversity of literacy practices this new vision of information literacy, Lloyd and Talja argue, should more correctly now be described as “information literacies”.
Lloyd and Talja present a number of significant authors and viewpoints so as to explore both the more traditional views of the library professional and the newer, more complex socially constructed multi‐literacies. The studies in this work present a wide range of insights into questions on transferable practice, context learning and the challenges presented when information literacy is merged with education and training, among a host of others. Information literacy emerges as a part of formal and informal learning in education, workplace and everyday settings. Essentially, the majority view in this work suggests that the notion of a body of generic information evaluative skills is problematic – that information skills are far more context based than current skills teaching ideas allow. Information literacy, they argue, is a social practice rather than a set of generic skills.
For the practicing information professional this work presents theoretical and practical frameworks of significant value. For the information academic a number of the insights offered by this work draw attention to emerging epistemic cultures that have caused recent research to question the more traditional notion of information literacy skills and their formalised learning. There are “other ways of learning” and these are amply highlighted by the different contributors. This work suggests new ways of looking at information literacy contexts in the light of practice theory and sociocultural theory, both of which tend to suggest strongly that information and knowledge are both site specific. The repercussions of this on the more formalised teaching of information skills that has been the “norm” heretofore, will be some time in their development. What this work highlights however is that there is no easy compartmentalisation possible with the concept of information literacy – a tendency that has rather over engineered our consideration of the subject to the present time. For some time now we have been rather preoccupied with teaching information literacy skills in a formal educational setting. Lloyd and Talja encourage us to break free from this rather limited context and consider the wider social issues of all the information literacies.
Presented in highly accessible language this scholarly work provides much food for thought and some exceptional frameworks for future research. This work is highly recommended and a fascinating read for information professionals as well as those in training to become such.
