Concise Guide to Information Literacy (Revised)

Information literacy (IL) knowledge and skills are not at the top of students’ lists of what they want to learn, write Lanning (Reference and Instructional Services for Information Literacy Skills in School Libraries) and Gerrity, both librarians and IL instructors at Southern Utah University. They also note that these skills will be lifelong assets once acquired. Acquiring IL skills is made accessible by this thorough work, which could be used as an IL course textbook (it includes assignments) or browsed as a reference book. A short bibliographic essay that prefaces the main body of the work offers a mini-course on teaching IL, a helpful addition for librarians who need to teach this subject but haven’t taken relevant courses or need a refresher. The book then goes on to provide considerable detail on every aspect of print and digital information literacy, using a model that is new to this edition of the work: the Reflective Inquiry model, which emphasizes the cyclical nature of research and encourages students to reflect on what they’ve learned at each stage. Lanning and Gerrity’s language is concise and accessible to learners, happily offering clarity on topics that can be challenging, such as Boolean logic.