Introduction

A full history of IL remains to be written. A commonly-stated position – so frequently presented that it has become a fundamental trope of the field – is that the concept was created in a 1974 report by Paul Zurkowski, presented to the US National Commission on Libraries and Information Science and entitled The Information Service Environment: Relationships and Priorities. In Kelly's eulogy to this work and its author, he writes (2014, 1): ‘The power of Information Literacy was unleashed in 1974 when Paul G. Zurkowski, Esq., founded the IL movement at the dawn of the Information Age.’ The statement is, at best, an exaggeration. Yet, many other writers (Rader, 2002; Eisenberg, Lowe and Spitzer, 2004; Markless and Streatfield, 2007) consider Zurkowski (1974) as such a seminal piece that their histories pay no attention to relevant work that comes before it.

Computerisation may have brought about significant changes to how we work with and learn about information landscapes, but the value of information per se has been recognised for millennia. Socrates recognised ‘that knowledge ought to be applied to conduct in the same way as it was already applied with such success to carpentry, shoemaking or medicine’ (Lindsay, 1906, xii). Plato would ‘persuade those who are to share in the highest affairs of the city to take to calculation, and embrace it in no amateur spirit… until they arrive by the help of sheer intelligence at a vision of the nature of numbers’ (Lindsay, 1906, 219). In other words, he affirms the importance of information, an ability to handle it effectively and an objective, dispassionate viewpoint, when it comes to taking effective decisions and planning (military) strategy.

Information, and by extension those trained in its effective use and application, has always been valuable to power holders. The history of espionage, propaganda and surveillance acknowledges this, whether in wartime and/or in asserting political strength at home. Control over information gathering and dispersal is a key element in how consent to dominant political orders is secured less through overt force and more through the manufacturing of consent, or what Gramsci (1971) called hegemony. Hegemonic processes include control over culture, education and the media. Dahl (1961) included ‘control over information’ in his analysis of key political resources.

Ground-breaking can be an overused and hackneyed phrase but it is entirely true in this case, and an apt pun, for a book that focuses on information landscapes in their infinite variety. But that's not to say that it is narrow in view, this is a much broader treatment on the discourse of information literacy – it is a sure-footed and forensic exploration of the topic. Drew's discussion on the history of information literacy is a very clear break with received wisdom of the past and especially questions the hegemony of thought embodied in powerful Western voices. Drew provides us with a critical overview, in a sense an information literacy of information literacy, which has been sadly lacking but now rectified in this volume. However, it is the notion of the information landscape that defines this work.

When Mark Hepworth and I wrote our book on information literacy, we were very conscious of the ‘information character’ of an information source (whatever that might be), but never fully developed what we meant by that. Drew gives us a clear notion of what information character is through this notion of an information landscape (not as metaphor but as embodied social practice); how we inhabit, map and navigate it to become, not just informed, but to make well-calibrated judgements of the information we encounter. It is notable that Drew draws our attention to the overlooked, and often misunderstood issue by those outside the information profession, that information literacy is not simply about technical competencies, no, it is much more than this. Indeed, it is about our practice as we move through, encounter and use information for whatever purpose.

Information literacy is a social and cognitive set of practices which help us locate ourselves in the world. These practices are contextual (work, education or play), negotiated and re-negotiated and, are not entirely rational. Therein lies a problem, which Drew highlights very eloquently, in effect the limited perspective that information literacy taught in higher education brings. Educators are excellent at enabling or even empowering students to become information literate within the educational context but this does not translate well to the workplace because, like the geographical landscape where mountains and valleys are very different places, the information landscapes of education and work are entirely different too.