Developing People’s Information Capabilities: Fostering Information Literacy in Educational, Workplace and Community Contexts Edited by

Citation

Nicole Gaston (2015), "Developing People’s Information Capabilities: Fostering Information Literacy in Educational, Workplace and Community Contexts Edited by", The Electronic Library, Vol. 33 No. 6, pp. 1195-1196. https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-07-2015-0129

This volume brings together a number of chapters discussing information literacy theory and research. The list of contributors for this volume includes well-known experts in the area of information literacy such as Christine Bruce, Heidi Julien and Sheila Webber. There are examples from New Zealand, Singapore, rural Alaska, South Africa, Thailand, Tanzania, Brazil and Australia amongst other contexts. This truly international scope provides some useful insights not found in other resources of this nature, and provides increased access to research exploring information literacy amongst non-Western populations.

Nevertheless, as is the case with many edited books, there is a noticeable disparity between chapters and significant gaps in terms of quality from one chapter to another. For example, a chapter by Kinsky and Smith exploring cultural awareness and media provides some interesting insights, however might carry more weight if the authors had more closely linked their study to information literacy and the overall theme of the volume. The authors have focussed on cultural and media literacy, with very little discussion of how those fields relate to information literacy, and there is an absence of information science resources in the references. Their chapter does however provide one of the few examples in the book related to education outside of the tertiary sector. Some chapters have quite broad relevance, whilst others provide results of case studies or discuss specific projects in great detail, which may have little resonance in other contexts.

The number of errors present in the reference lists of some chapters is of concern and possibly indicative of an overall lack of a comprehensive review. While the volume’s back cover suggests the editors have emphasised a holistic approach, demonstrated by their inclusion of several chapters written by authors outside Western academia, the overall lack of cohesiveness feels more disjointed. Nevertheless, some of the chapters are extremely interesting and provide some excellent discussion not widely found in the Library and Information Science literature, such as Tavares, De Souza Costa and Hepworth’s discussion of the role of information literacy and information access in enhancing social welfare in Brazil. Walton and Hepworth’s chapter provides some very useful discussion of theory around information literacy, information behaviour and how the two fields can contribute to “Developing people’s information capabilities”.

While good in intention, the volume itself goes from excellent to questionable from chapter to chapter. Scholars working outside Organisation for Economic Development nations encounter many challenges in producing and disseminating quality work, and this volume’s intentional inclusion of numerous chapters written by authors working in other contexts represents a significant commitment on the part of the editors to providing publication opportunities to those authors. Closer engagement with less experienced authors and better quality control during the editing process would have helped ensure the volume more consistently achieved its full potential, but, nevertheless, the volume is diverse in international scope. Therefore, while many chapters are well-researched and well-written, others are less so, and consequently this volume is better thought of as a collection of articles, some of which are better than others, rather than an individual piece of work.