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  • Collaborative Information Literacy Assessments: Strategies for Evaluating Teaching and Learning
  • Trudi Bellardo Hahn
Collaborative Information Literacy Assessments: Strategies for Evaluating Teaching and Learning, ed. Thomas P. Mackey and Trudi E. Jacobson. New York and London: Neal-Schuman, 2010. 242p. $85. (ISBN 978-1-55570-693-7)

Collaborative Information Literacy Assessments: Strategies for Evaluating Teaching and Learning is an edited volume of eight chapters that describes cases of assessment practice in information literacy instruction, with creative suggestions for more complete, meaningful, and productive collaborations between librarians and faculty. It is organized into three sections (business, social science and education, and humanities), with several chapters in each section. It would be a mistake, however, for readers to limit themselves to their own disciplinary area; the cases from every discipline have excellent ideas that are transferable to other contexts. In fact, the most useful case might fall outside a reader's disciplinary area.

The book's greatest strength is that each chapter is co-authored by a team that includes at least one librarian and a collaborating faculty member. It is fairly common to hear about such collaborations in our literature, but usually from the perspective of the librarian. It is rare to hear the voice of the faculty member directly, and that feature of this book greatly strengthens its credibility and usefulness. As the title of the book suggests, every case has a strong focus on the assessment aspects. Again, this is not common—assessment is usually a minor element tacked on at the end. As assessment and accountability are being mandated in most university environments, this book will be a valuable tool for everyone involved in teaching information literacy, even for those who have been doing it for a while.

Collaborative Information Literacy Assessments could function as a textbook introduction to collaboration and assessment, but students and new instruction librarians may find it tedious to read straight through. This is because each chapter is also a report of How We Did It Good at Our University, with the requisite introductory section on the value of information literacy skills, the need for collaboration to tie the instruction to course goals, the critical importance of assessment, and a thorough literature review. These topics are relevant to each case study, but reading them one after another is repetitive. There is of course benefit in bringing all these [End Page 741] cases together in a single volume, but having read one case, readers will likely skip or skim through the introductory sections of the others.

The strongest chapters provide examples of actual materials, rubrics, or other assessment tools used. A good example of this is Fig. 2.3, representing business information literacy capabilities. Even though it is specific to first-year, second-year, and third-year business students at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, it could readily be adapted elsewhere. The specificity is an asset, not a liability. Another strength of the chapters is their emphasis on the importance of fully integrating librarians' and faculty members' goals and working closely together to develop activities and assignments. This level of integration is challenging and time-consuming, but, as the cases illustrate, it makes a huge difference in how well the students learn and retain information literacy skills. Further, in each case authors offer suggestions for best practices on overcoming obstacles to collaboration.

Strong editorial hands have produced a volume with few errors and with smooth consistency of presentation, even though the chapters were produced by a wide variety of authors from the United States, Great Britain, and New Zealand. The authors all have the requisite experience and knowledge and have invested a great deal of time and thought into their collaborative teaching efforts. Some chapters are more tightly written and more pleasurable to read than others, but overall Collaborative Information Literacy Assessments reads well. The editors, Thomas Mackey and Trudi Jacobson, are both well-established experts in the fields of information literacy and distance education and frequent contributors to the literature. They have collaborated twice before in editing books for the publisher Neal-Schuman: Using Technology to Teach Information Literacy (New York: Neal-Schuman, 2008) and Information Literacy Collaborations that Work...

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