reviews.indd


Book Reviews 

Information Literacy Programs in the 
Digital Age: Educating College and 
University Students Online. Comps. 
Alice Daughtery and Michael F. Russo. 
Chicago: American Library Associa-
tion, 2007. 275p. alk. paper, $48 (ISBN 
9780838984444). LC2007-31204. 

Compilers Alice Daugherty and Michael 
Russo have fully succeeded in meeting 
their set goal, which is to “…showcase 
the array of online information literacy 
programs that have cropped up across 
the country.” They assembled twenty-four 
chapters written by librarians at North 
American institutions with information 
literacy programs. The chapters are 
broken into three sections: “Information 
Literacy Credit Courses and Programs,” 
composed of eight chapters; “Information 
Literacy Instruction Embedded into Disci-
pline Courses and Programs,” by far the 
smallest section with only three chapters; 
and “Information Literacy Instruction 
Tutorials (General and Subject-Specific),” 
which is made up of thirteen chapters. 
Chapters are an average of ten pages 
in length. There is a template that most 
chapters follow, with some variations: 
Introduction, Rationale, Development, 
Content, Instruction, Program Assess-
ment, Lessons Learned, and Conclusion. 
In addition, many of the essays include 
at least one of the following: notes, ap-
pendices, or screenshots of or URLs to 
relevant instructional materials. 

Daugherty and Russo take into account 
that academic institutions vary widely 
in terms of information literacy require-
ments whether they be content level 
(graduate, undergraduate), subject mat-
ter, technology, and user type (on-campus, 
online only, or a hybrid). Programs run 
from the very specific audience such as a 
graduate seminary information literacy 
course (chapter two, “Graduate Online 
Information Literacy: The ACTS Experi-
ence”) or a tutorial for third-year medical 

students (chapter fourteen, 
“Giving Medical Students 
What They Want: Online 
Instruction at 11 p.m.”), to 
general programs geared to 
all undergraduates (multiple 
chapters). This smorgasbord 
allows the reader to pick and choose those 
that best meet the particular situational 
needs of the reader. 

The collection may become redundant 
if read the whole way through. A full read-
through works best if the reader wants to 
examine the commonalities in the chal-
lenges, advantages, and assessment of 
various information literacy programs. 
However, if the reader is looking for mod-
els that best fit a particular institution’s 
requirements, then the reader may find 
that a few of the chapters hold invaluable 
information for the select audience while 
the rest may not be particularly useful. 
For example, the discussion in chapter 
fourteen (“Giving Medical Students 
What They Want: Online Instruction at 
11 p.m.”) of the required information 
literacy skills needed by those studying 
evidence-based medicine will be of great 
importance to those off ering instruction 
in the health sciences but may not be of 
interest to others. 

There are two major omissions in this 
collection: a lack of abstracts and indexing. 
The absence of abstracts is particularly no-
table in this collection due to the ambigu-
ous nature of many of the essay titles. This 
trend is particularly prevalent in the “In-
formation Literacy Instruction Tutorials” 
section. It does not distinguish between 
those essays that focus on general tutorials 
and those that are subject-specifi c tutori-
als. The reader often cannot determine 
whether a tutorial is general or subject-
specific, and, if the latter, what the subject 
is or who the intended audience is until 
reading several paragraphs of an essay. 
For example, the title of chapter thirteen, 

476 



“Smart Searching: An Easily Customiz-
able Subject-Specific Online Information 
Literacy Tutorial,” does not make it clear 
that a template was created for science 
librarians to modify for various sciences; 
likewise, it is not clear that the tutorial 
in chapter fifteen, “From Classroom to 
Computer: Collaboration, Integration, and 
Success,” was created in conjunction with 
education faculty who teach “Children’s 
Literature in the Classroom.” Daugherty 
and Russo do provide brief overviews of 
the essays in their introduction, allowing 
the reader to garner some information 
about the different programs by scanning 
the introduction. 

This problem of the absence of ab-
stracts is compounded by the lack of 
indexing in this collection. The reader 
cannot easily locate the points mentioned 
in the previous paragraph and is also un-
aware of gems that may be “hidden” in an 
essay such as the type of soft ware utilized, 
what was learned about teaching APA 
citation style (chapter three, “The Devel-
opment of a Library Research Methods 
Course for Online Graduate Students in 
Education”) or a novel method of adver-
tising library resources (chapter thirteen, 
“Smart Searching: An Easily Customiz-
able Subject-Specific Online Information 
Literacy Tutorial”). 

These criticisms aside, this collection 
is an invaluable resource to any librarian 
either considering the creation of a new 
information literacy program or redesign-
ing one already in place. Given the high 
interest in information literacy programs 
in the profession that has been expressed 
in many venues, a compilation such as 
this one is long overdue. This book is 
highly recommended.—Lisa Vassady, 
Radford University. 

Richard M. Dougherty. Streamlining 
Library Services: What We Do, How 
Much Time It Takes, What It Costs, and 
How We Can Do It Better. Lanham, 
Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2008. 272p. 
alk. paper, $45 (ISBN 9780810851986). 
LC2007-40288. 

Book Reviews 477 

“Accountability” is a theme that runs 
through much of the literature of higher 
education today. In the administrative 
realm, the call for accountability may be 
reflected in more transparent budgeting 
practices or more stringent oversight of 
financial transactions. In the classroom, 
the call for accountability supports the 
movement toward outcomes-based as-
sessment. In the library, it has influenced 
the development of new approaches to 
data collection and reporting, strategic 
planning and budgeting, and recognition 
that libraries must embrace a “culture 
of assessment.” Retitled for the 21st 
century, this new edition of Dougherty 
and Heinritz’s Scientific Management of 
Library Operations (2nd ed., 1982) presents 
a variety of approaches to engaging in 
rigorous inquiry into workplace activities, 
processes, and workflows. 

In the current edition, Dougherty 
presents an argument for the importance 
of assessment of the work environment, 
an introduction to the tradition of “sci-
entific management” (a term associated 
most closely with the work of Frederick 
Taylor in the early 20th century, and 
with W. Edwards Deming’s Total Quality 
Management [TQM] movement in the 
1980s), and an overview of how several 
specific tools for scientifi c management 
might be applied in the library context 
(for instance, process analysis, diary 
studies, time studies). The goal of the text 
is not simply to introduce the reader to 
these approaches for assessing the work 
environment, however, but to “rescue” 
these tools of analysis from what the 
author perceives as a general sentiment 
that they are outdated. Terms like “sci-
entific management,” “Taylorism,” and 
“TQM” call to mind specifi c approaches 
to management that Dougherty recog-
nizes many have rejected, and this text is 
essentially a plea not to “throw the baby 
out with the bathwater.” Dougherty ar-
gues that anyone concerned about library 
assessment or library management today 
should continue to take advantage of the 
analytical tools developed as part of the