In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Introduction
  • John Crawford (bio)

This is the second of two issues of Library Trends on the theme of “Information Literacy Beyond the Academy,” which seeks to relocate information literacy outside its traditional base in higher education and to position it more within innovative thinking in such areas as: employability training, skills development, workplace decision making, adult literacies training and community learning and development, scholastic education, lifelong learning, and health and media literacies. The role of the public library in promoting awareness and understanding of information in many of these activities is a potentially important one and is explored in some of the articles listed below.

While the first issue focused more on policy-making issues both at a national and international level the current issue is more concerned with developing perspectives on specific areas often based round a discrete piece of research. Nine articles are offered here that break down into broadly three areas:

  • • Health literacy, which explores how people access and use health information, however defined and interpreted, and the overarching policy issues that emerge from these studies

  • • Lifelong learning and community, in which the theme of supporting the information needs of ordinary people in a wide range of learning contexts emerges (indeed, participative learning and learning as part of a community appear in several articles presented here)

  • • Education that includes a study of information skills acquisition across a range of educational sectors

As with the previous issue a common theme emerging is the need to greatly widen the concept of what information sources are and take much more account of social interaction and collective learning. Although health literacy [End Page 455] is a discrete topic it also occurs in other articles often in conjunction with another recurring theme, the information needs of the people over fifty.

Contents of the Issue

Health Literacy

The first article is a study by Christine Yates and colleagues that explores health information use by older Australians within everyday life. It emphasizes the importance of information literacy in everyday life and sets health literacy within this context and sees older Australians as important health consumers. It reports on interviews with twenty older adults and includes a useful discussion about definitions of health literacy. The methodology used is phenomenography, which as Webber, Boon, and Johnston (2005) have shown is a particularly valuable tool as it seeks to explore differences and variations in the way people think or experience particular phenomena and can challenge the conventional perspectives of LIS professionals. Interviewees were found to be interested in information that was immediately relevant and focused on themselves as a source of knowledge such as observing their own health history and symptoms. As Christopher Walker also found (see below), learning from others was an important factor. Information sources favored by LIS professionals were not highly rated although health professionals were held in high regard. Policy lessons learned are discussed.

Audrey Marshall, Flis Henwood, and Elizabeth S. Guy from the University of Brighton in the United Kingdom pursue the health use issue further with a study of how people use information and communications technology and information literacy skills to manage obesity. They note contradictions in UK National Health Service policy that supports the importance of patient information in theory but does nothing to support information skills development in practice. As with Christine Yates and colleagues there is a discussion of definitions of health literacy. As with other contributors, varying types of information sources were identified such as information on packaging. Information seeking was found to be an unstructured process in practice and the role of information in weight management was shown to be less significant than previously thought. As with other researchers the authors found human contact and interaction to be important in supporting information use. The article contains valuable direct quotations and shows that it is important to purse local initiatives within the context of national policy.

Lisa O’Connor and Marcia Rapchak introduce a rather different topic, the debate over healthcare reform in the United States and how it is discussed in online political forums. They find that there is a need to take account of the realities of the information environment and the information seeking behavior...

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