Enabling End Users: Information Skills Training

Citation

Noon, P. (2006), "Enabling End Users: Information Skills Training", Library Review, Vol. 55 No. 7, pp. 458-459. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530610682227

The Chandos “Information Professional” series is aimed at the busy information professional and designed to provide an authoritative view of current thinking, and to be easy to read and practical. Ann Poyner's book is certainly practical. Her checklist approach is very much aimed at how to plan, organise and deliver information skills training sessions right down to the often forgotten basis of “Is the room comfortable and do the PCs work?”. It includes sections on searching process and techniques, onpreparing training material, on one‐to‐one and group tuition and on other basics such as workshop administration, ending with a section on electronic resources and gateways.

Given the desire to focus on the practical, there is very little exploration of the justification for information skills or of where they fit into the wider library context, apart from a very brief mention of the librarian as educator, and noting that information skills is increasingly a key part of the librarians' role. I think this is a shame because it would have made a useful introductory section especially given all the work carried out by the Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL), for example, on the Big Blue or INFORMs projects. Some of this would definitely fall within the scope of “an authoritative view of current thinking”. But never mind: it is, as the series requires, easy to read with lots of headings and subheadings containing brief and very simple advice and to its credit mercifully, it avoids those tedious digressions into learning styles and learning theory that blight some earnest writing on information skills. Poyner manages to get it into less than two pages in nice simple language.

The main drawback to the book is that the content never quite lived up to my expectations of its title. Although the author tries hard to justify the inclusion of her early chapters on service reviews and customer surveys, it is not until the reader gets about one‐third of the way through the book that it actually gets into what most of us would think of as information skills. This may be, of course, because I am coming at it from a higher education (HE) perspective where so much work has been carried out on information skills and because the book is overtly written from the author's National Health Service perspective.

There is nothing wrong with that, but it does not mention or even hint at it in the title or in the introduction, presumably for marketing reasons. This made it a rather frustrating read because I was not sure if the content would be of much value to experienced HE practitioners or for public libraries either. Eventually I realised that it is probably really aimed at small libraries where information skills will be a task unfamiliar to some, particularly those new to the profession, or indeed to those new to information skills in any sector who have never had to plan or deliver information skills sessions and where this kind of practical, nuts and bolts, advice will probably always be very welcome.