About this book

Why yet another book on information literacy? The answer is quite straightforward: because we wanted to provide a different kind of resource, that we hope will be of practical benefit to practitioners developing learning, teaching and training in the library and information world.

There is a huge amount about information literacy published every year, ranging from theoretical overviews of the nature of information literacy to case studies of the applications of different pedagogical approaches. Articles, book chapters and books cover a variety of critical, discursive, reflective, research-focused, qualitative and quantitative approaches.

We wanted to do something a little different. Rather than prepare lots of case studies of how it went well (there are plenty of other places to get that kind of information), we decided to compile a series of hints and tips, together with some best practice guidelines. Using this book should help to extend your teaching repertoire, suggesting novel approaches to some regular teaching conundrums and be a useful resource for definitions and background information.

Most of the tips are especially relevant for those of you running a structured teaching or training event. This might be in formal education (in schools, colleges and universities), in public and community settings, in health services or in corporate settings. Increasingly this kind of work – essentially moving beyond doing presentations to leading interactive learning events – is key for nearly all of us.

As experienced practitioners, we hope that the book will provide practical advice, underpinned by our experience and theory. We have deliberately tried not to make this too academic a text, as we think there are other, more useful works to support the development of your knowledge and understanding in this area. So, although we do include references to useful additional sources these are by no means intended to be exhaustive. We do want this book to help build your confidence as a teacher. It should provide you with a starting point for experimenting with different teaching methods and strategies.

But remember, you need to develop your own ideas and teaching styles and we hope that this book will provide a source of guidance and inspiration as your experience grows.