Information literacy and Web 2.0: is it just hype?

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that Web 2.0 provides an exciting set of tools for librarians to help their students become more information‐literate.

Recently, information overload and Web 2.0 have led librarians to adopt practices labelled as Library 2.0. Information literacy can be the key to affecting the learning attitudes and characteristics adopted by the users, caricatured as the “Web generation”. Web 2.0 tools provide new, interactive ways to engage them. The literature is reviewed to provide examples of librarians using Web 2.0 tools to improve the information literacy of their users.

Librarians are embracing Web 2.0 as it becomes more mainstream and experimenting with the tools to supplement their information literacy interventions. Many of these are being well received but their quantity and measures of their impact on learning have yet to be assessed.

The link between information literacy and Web 2.0 is novel, encourages constructive learning and enables respected educational methods (e.g. reflection) to be used in different ways.