Creating a Comprehensive Information Literacy Plan: A How-To-Do-It Manual and CD-ROM for Librarians (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Creating a Comprehensive Information Literacy Plan: A How-To-Do-It Manual and CD-ROM for Librarians Craig Gibson Creating a Comprehensive Information Literacy Plan: A How-To-Do-It Manual and CD-ROM for Librarians, Joanna M. Burkhardt, Mary C. MacDonald, and Andree J. Rathemacher . New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers, Inc., 2005. 200p. with CD-ROM $89.95 (ISBN 1-55570-533-2) One of the continuing challenges for librarians in their instructional endeavors is developing and sustaining coherent information literacy programming at their institutions. Pilot projects, alliances with first-year experience programs, collaborations with particular academic departments, and other initiatives are all important pieces of creating these programs, but such initiatives are not always approached from the vantage point of comprehensive planning. Focused opportunism and tactical successes are often the norm with information literacy planning; strategic foresight, informed by data collection, needs assessment, political considerations, and environment scans, with program review and benchmarks for success, may be considered from the outset but often episodically and marginally. This manual will focus the minds of instruction program managers, their library directors and associate directors, and their colleagues in other academic units on the full range of planning issues involved in creating an information literacy program. It explains specifically the steps the authors have found useful in writing a plan for a program—not exactly the same process as creating a program itself but, nonetheless, a very useful delineation of how planning can work. The primary focus is on one institution (University of Rhode Island), with some additional examples from other institutions including secondary schools, liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and universities. The governing concept behind this manual is that creating a comprehensive information literacy program is possible by producing a written plan in four manageable steps: plan to plan (preliminary steps, such as creating a planning group, doing a needs assessment, and collecting background data); plan to write (establishing timelines for writing, creating structures and topics, and considering various audiences); writing the plan (considering key points of content and organization and gaining approvals from various constituencies and administrators); and assessing, maintaining, and promoting the plan (reviewing and updating the plan, assessing the impact of the program itself, and marketing the plan). In addition to the key sections covering these steps, another section provides a toolkit that includes bibliographies [End Page 371] on information literacy, needs assessment, peer institution comparisons, marketing materials, and other resources. Finally, the manual includes examples of information literacy plans from a range of institutions. The primary value of this manual is the confidence building it will provide new instruction program managers who find the planning process for an information literacy program at a sizeable institution very daunting. As the authors rightfully point out, a written document produced through collaboration among the key stakeholders, both within and outside the library, can do much to advance the case for a comprehensive information literacy program. The steps delineated in the manual are not necessarily new, but the authors have contextualized these steps very well in the contemporary higher education environment (with some occasional discussion as well on how these processes would work in a secondary school setting). Once a written plan begins to take shape, various stakeholders involved in producing it feel ownership and will continue to be interested in the program that the written plan is designed to reflect, especially as the plan is revisited and the program undergoes assessment and change. The manual reflects contemporary and emerging issues related to information literacy, including related concepts such as information fluency, information competence, technology literacy, and media literacy; it also discusses accrediting bodies and their impact on information literacy planning; and it identifies documents from professional associations to assist planners such as Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education and Characteristics of Programs of Information Literacy that Illustrate Best Practices: A Guideline. The manual also provides examples of information literacy standards adapted to disciplines, an area that is still evolving. Two useful features provide visual interest and show the reader how creative approaches can be taken to implement various steps delineated in the planning processes described. Worksheets assist the planner in thinking about specific steps in writing...