Information Literacy in Music: An Instructor's Companion ed. by Beth Christensen, Erin Conor, and Marian Ritter (review)

One of the most important duties of music librarians is to provide information-literacy instruction to students. While there are a number of tools they can use to design and create engaging and effective lesson plans for teaching general research skills, music librarians are often challenged in creating library sessions that address the myriad needs of music students. Applied music students may need to sharpen skills focused on finding particular musical works, while music history students are required to become familiar with basic research sources in musicology. Librarians both new and experienced will find help addressing these demands with Information Literacy in Music: An Instructor's Companion, a recent publication in the Music Library Association's Technical Reports Series. Rather than simply describing pedagogical theories, this volume employs a hands-on approach to instructional practice and provides sample assignments and lesson plans for thirty-nine information literacy sessions encompassing a wide variety of music genres and course levels.

The scope of Information Literacy in Music is broad, covering not just multiple subtopics within music but also elements of musicianship and theory skills within some lessons. The practical arrangement of entries allows users to quickly find lessons by topic as well as learning objectives and will suit both novice and experienced instructors. The editors group lesson plans into thirteen major categories (or subdisciplines within music) ranging from ethnomusicology to jazz to music therapy, but many plans could be adapted to additional music subdisciplines. They also provide quick reference to lesson plans through two separate indexes: the first by student-learning outcome and the second by instruction scenario. The latter sets up the context of the lesson within the classroom and includes descriptions such as "active learning" or "scaffolded assignments" for instructors wishing to try their hand at specific instructional methods (p. xv).

Each lesson begins with an introduction by the author(s), followed by a list of student-learning outcomes and a detailed description of the assignment. The section titled "Classroom Instruction" outlines the mechanics of actually teaching the lesson and cites required materials for creating an optimal learning environment. Concluding each lesson is an assessment measure followed by the actual assignment as delivered to the student. Most of the assignments are a reiteration of a paper document, but some include screenshots of online components. Source material in plans is carefully documented with detailed bibliographies (where appropriate) and, in some cases, footnotes on background research. Acknowledging that users of the book will include music faculty as well as music librarians, the editors refrain from inserting library jargon within the text and also provide a helpful glossary of terms. Because the intended audience extends beyond library professionals, the "Student Learning Outcomes" section of some entries omits references to the American College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework [accessed 15 August 2019]). While some authors elect to mention specific frames addressed within a lesson, interested readers can find the full text of the ACRL document in an appendix (pp. 231–38).

The authors of the lesson plans represent a wide variety of educational institutions, including conservatories and music schools, small liberal arts colleges, and large research universities. While the majority of contributors are music librarians with diverse backgrounds, other contributors are music professors representing subdisciplines within music (such as music therapy and choral music) and faculty in English and art/design departments. The result is a versatile collection of instructional plans reflecting a great variety of viewpoints and approaches to instruction. The diversity of authors and disciplines also allows for exploration of multidisciplinary instructional opportunities, and even if a sample lesson may not exactly fit course subjects, the sources and learning outcomes can assist readers in creating their...