Instructional Design for Librarians and Information Professionals

Citation

Smith, A. (2012), "Instructional Design for Librarians and Information Professionals", The Electronic Library, Vol. 30 No. 5, pp. 748-749. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640471211275765

Instruction is increasingly a major role for librarians. Users have access to information tools that only a couple of decades ago would have seemed like something out of a science fiction novel. But users need the knowledge and skills to use these tools effectively, not just to find some information, but to obtain the best information. Reference librarians in particular have moved from a simple role of answering users' queries to a more complex role of supporting users as they gain information literacy skills.

In order to instruct effectively, librarians need to draw on the knowledge of instructional design that has been developed to support learning. Most library and information studies education programmes now include some elements of instructional design, but this may not be sufficient for a librarian for whom this is a major role, and there are also many librarians who gained their qualifications before the concept of instructing users had moved beyond “bibliographic instruction”. Instructional Design for Librarians and Information Professionals aims to address this need.

The book starts with an overview of models of instructional design, which is defined as “a systematic approach to developing educational programmes”. Farmer is particularly enthusiastic about ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation), with its library oriented offshoot BLAAM (Blended Librarians Adapted ADDIE Model). Having got the acronyms out of the way, the book then looks at the nature of learners in instructional design, planning and needs assessment, decisions about design content, instructional delivery, and the use of technology and instructional systems such as Blackboard and Moodle. The books finishes up with an overview of management issues such as documentation and marketing.

Farmer packs a lot into just over 200 pages. Most aspects of instructional design, and relevant technologies, are covered. Of course any print text is going to have gaps in educational technology – a quaint reference to “computing tablets” was clearly written before iPads started appearing widely in students' hands; Facebook and Skype don't get mentioned, and there's a rather hopeful suggestion that instructors send off their “learning object search agent” to fetch resources from the semantic web.

Does this book answer all the instructional design needs of librarians and information professionals? It depends. The text is largely a recap of instructional design in general, with relatively little on the specifics of LIS. The lesson plans at the end of each chapter are mostly for school librarians introducing an information literacy component into a lesson, for example a civics class on constitutional rights. School librarians will find this useful, but tertiary and special librarians, not to mention archives and records managers, might prefer to read more general texts on instructional design, topping up with the relevant professional literature.