Library User Education: Powerful Learning, Powerful Partnerships

Citation

Marcella, R. (2003), "Library User Education: Powerful Learning, Powerful Partnerships", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 59 No. 2, pp. 234-236. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410310463572

This monograph contains chapters based on 42 presentations given at a conference sponsored by the University of Iowa Center of Teaching held in November 1999. The Conference was designed as a forum for the discussion of educational strategies and programmes supporting faculty, staff and students in teaching, learning and research, in particular those to which libraries have made a contribution.

In her introduction Barbara Dewey stresses her vision of the importance of user education for university and college library users in an environment where technology is transforming the ways in which users seek and use information. Although the collection of papers focuses on academic life, there is an explicit sense of the significance of such education for information use – or information literacy – in all aspects of people's lives. Dewey argues convincingly that such education cannot be provided by librarians alone, but must be developed and delivered through partnerships with teachers, technologists and administrators, through the kinds of collaborative initiative that are amply described in the collected work.

Given that the book contains so many papers, it would be invidious to attempt to review each contribution individually. Collectively, it represents a snapshot in time of what has been and will continue to be a very rapidly changing and dynamic area of library work, where the content of services and their mode of communication and dissemination have radically shifted to an emphasis on electronic media and where the nature of the literacy or educational content must shift rapidly to meet the challenge. It, therefore, seeks to reflect concrete strategies to unchain libraries and educational methods to harness effectively all forms of information and scholarly production through partnerships, providing many illustrations of the issues that those developing programmes have faced and the solutions that they have found effective.

The collection itself presents a wide‐ranging set of perspectives on user education from educational theorists, such as Lizabeth Wilson on information literacy and Brian Hawkins on the use of technology in higher education. The majority of the papers, however, are by librarians who can draw on their experience in designing, developing and delivering education programmes and systems. The emphasis is equally on the US experience as one might expect with almost all contributors based in US institutions of further and higher education, although occasional papers deal with, for example, the Open University's support for distance learning students in the UK (Bremner). However, a perusal of these papers suggests, as one might expect, that the experience described is not dissimilar to that of the British university librarian, although at times programmes and new initiatives appear to be better funded. The result is a collection of rich and convincing accounts of the work that is being undertaken and of the issues and concerns that are facing the practitioner in trying to realise the potential of new technologies both in providing information services and in supporting the educational and research needs of their user group.

The papers themselves vary quite markedly in scope, depth of discussion and the extent to which they contain primary research data or are simply description and argument. The paper referred to above by Bremner, for example, consists purely of a very brief – one page – description of the Open University's learner support. On the other hand contributions, such as those from Koenig and Novotny evaluating an online course integrated library instruction programme and by Fisher and Wilson on teaching evidence‐based healthcare, provide fairly detailed accounts of the research results, reporting primary data and conclusions. Many of the papers have a very practical utility in that they provide practitioners’ open accounts of what succeeded and failed in, for example, building bridges with faculty staff via library workshops (Chapman and White).

Overall, this collection contains much of interest to academics, researchers and practitioners who are interested in improving academic users’ capacity to access and exploit information resources. The individual papers are approachable and interesting, set within a logical structure and well supported by bibliographies attached to some of the papers and a sound index. I would recommend it to anyone involved in developing and delivering user instruction programmes and to those involved in research in this area.