Towards an everyday life information literacy mind-set: a review of literature
| Published date | 10 July 2017 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-07-2016-0094 |
| Date | 10 July 2017 |
| Pages | 634-665 |
| Author | Konstantina Martzoukou,Elham Sayyad Abdi |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
Towards an everyday life
information literacy mind-set:
a review of literature
Konstantina Martzoukou
School of Creative and Cultural Business,
Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK, and
Elham Sayyad Abdi
School of Information Systems,
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
Abstract
Purpose –Information literacy (IL) within the everyday life context is regarded as an important condition for
civic participation and engagement, informed citizenship, health and well-being. However, compared to the
significant amount of IL research within educational and workplace settings, there has been relatively little
research in relation to the value of IL within everyday life situations. The purpose of this paper is to explore
existing empirical research that addresses aspects of IL within the context of everyday life, identifying
current gaps in the literature, highlighting key theoretical positions, and mapping trends.
Design/methodology/approach –The review has been conducted in the form of a scoping study that aims
to map the key concepts underpinning this research area and the main sources and types of evidence
available. It is based on journal literature reporting primary research, published from 2000 to 2016 and
sourced from a range of different databases covering IL research.
Findings –IL practices take place within diverse everyday life contexts. The key research directions have
been categorised into four broad contextual areas, encompassing leisure and community activities, citizenship
and the fulfilment of social roles, public health and critical life situations. These point to the need for
developing an IL mind-set which is discussed as an adaptive, transferable and ongoing activity that
transgresses the boundaries of prescribed skills within the specific contexts of work and education.
Originality/value –This research area is still in its infancy and more varied contexts need to be explored to
nurture a robust understanding of the use and impact of IL in people’s everyday lives. The paper also
highlights the implications of the lack of IL and identifies the key players in the advocacy of IL within
different everyday life settings.
Keywords Competences, Information literacy, Community, Information services, Behaviour, Skills,
Information research
Paper type Literature review
1. Introduction
Information literacy (IL) within an everyday life context is connected to searching for,
critically evaluating and using information effectively to solve everyday problems.
Everyday life information literacy (ELIL) is about being able to address a range of
information needs that relate to everyday practices as well as making informed decisions
that are of significant value to individuals and communities. IL is regarded as an important
condition for civic participation and engagement, informed citizenship, health, well-being
and generally, people’s quality of life (Leung, 2009).
According to the Alexandria Proclamation on IL and lifelong learning, IL “provides the
key to effective access, use and creation of content to support economic development,
education, health and human services, and all other aspects of contemporary societies […]
extends beyond current technologies to encompass learning, critical thinking and
interpretative skills across professional boundaries and empowers individuals and
communities”(Garner, 2005, p. 3). Bruce has proposed that IL is an “overarching literacy of
life in the 21st century”(Bruce, 2002).
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 73 No. 4, 2017
pp. 634-665
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-07-2016-0094
Received 20 July 2016
Revised 13 January 2017
Accepted 18 January 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
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Despite the clearvalue of IL within the everyday life context, most empirical research has
been conducted within educational and workplace settings. For example, a study by
Whitworth (2014) revealed that more than 60 per cent of the IL literature is found within the
context of higher education libraries. Aharony (2010) explored emerging IL trends during
the period of 1999-2009 and concluded that IL has been mainly associated with education,
librarianship and with only few studies starting “to shift into workplaces and the business
world”. An additional setting, that of health and medicine, appeared to a lesser extent,
stressing “people’s need for informationliteracy in this specific context”while research within
the context of society was found to be limited and its impact was “probably minor”(p. 271).
On the other hand, the everyday life context has been an established area of research
within the domain of information seeking behaviour (ISB) since the development of the
everyday information seeking behaviour (everyday life information seeking (ELIS))
conceptual framework by Savolainen (1995). Although this could be considered as a
related field of study, most ISB research does not address the critical positioning and
value of IL. Existing IL research with an emphasis on different everyday life settings is,
therefore, limited and, overall, lacks a holistic view. Based on that argument, this work
aims to present a critical review of existing research with the everyday life IL domain and
to develop a research agenda for further empirical explorations in this area. The literature
review addresses a variety of foci that explore demographic differences (e.g. older adults/
fourth age/retired people, young people/men, early years/preschool, nursery, aging
women), diverse social roles (e.g. parents, retired, citizens) and everyday life situations
that create a range of information needs linked to learning, personal development, health
and well-being. Its purpose is to function as an initial basis for further more systematic
explorations of the literature and to highlight the ELIL domain as o ne that requires a more
explicit focus.
2. Research objectives
Based on the above rationale, this study takes the form of a scoping review of the literature
around the domain of everyday IL, aiming to address the following research objectives: to
explore existing empirical research focussing on aspects of IL within the context of
everyday life, identifying current gaps in the literature; to highlight the key theoretical
positions and trends in this area, to make further research and policy recommendations on
the basis of these findings; and to propose a theoretical framework and research agenda for
the empirical research exploration of ELIL.
3. Methodology
Mays et al. (2001) have defined scoping reviews as publications that “aim to map rapidly the
key concepts underpinning a research area and the main sources and types of evidence
available, and can be undertaken as stand-alone projects in their own right, especially where
an area is complex or has not been reviewed comprehensively before”(p. 194). Arksey and
O’Malley (2005) have discussed a number of steps in conducting a scoping review of the
literature, which include: identifying the research questions and the domain that needs to be
explored, finding the relevant studies (through electronic databases, reference lists, websites
of organisations and conference proceedings), selecting those that are relevant to the
question(s), charting the data (i.e. the information on and from the relevant studies),
collating, summarizing and reporting the results and, finally, an optional step of consulting
stakeholders to get more references and provide insights on what the literature fails to
highlight. Therefore, this literature review presents a scoping study which aims to map and
conceptually synthesise existing knowledge on how IL has been explored so far within the
everyday life context.
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ELIL mind-set
3.1 Procedure for selecting articles
The review was conducted on the basis of journal literature, conference proceedings
and PhD theses (excluding book chapters and theoretical papers) reporting primary
research published from 2000 to 2016. The choice of time range for this review is
both relevant and essential for capturing ELIL experiences of the public experienced
within a changing web searching landscape. It was only around the turn of the millennium
that IL, both as a domain of research and an object for investigation started to evolve
(Bruce, 2016, p. 1), an era that also marked the growth and the establishment of
commercial web search engines. Saracevic has described how during the period from 1997
to 2004 signifies the “beginning and the maturity of public web searching”. In addition,
since 2000 a few larger search engines started dominating the web searching scene and
becoming global (Google was launched in 1999): “In 2003, Search Engine Worldwide listed
3,105 search engines in 211 countries”(Spink and Jansen, 2004, p. xiii). Within the sphere
of consumer health information, the web also started to be established at that time as an
important medium for information seeking and advice around health and medical
information issues.
The searches were conducted between June and November 2016 and publications were
sourced from a range of different databases covering library and IL research including:
ScienceDirect, Library and Information Science and Technology Abstracts (LISTA), ERIC,
Emerald, ABI/Inform, Library and Information Science Abstracts, Library Literature and
Information Science, Web of Science and Google Scholar.
As focus was placed on exploring the domains of “information literacy”and “everyday
life”, these two concepts were employed as the main search terms. Initially, the search was
conducted without restrictions to a particular search field (e.g. abstract, subject terms or
title). However, a general search in several cases (e.g. Emerald) resulted in a high number of
hits that were related to other parallel areas of interest, such as information seeking and
general information-related practices without , necessarily, a primary emphasis on
“information literacy”. In addition, in some of the databases, “information literacy”would
not even appear as a term in the abstract of the paper; instead, it would feature in the author
supplied keywords or would be briefly mentioned in one or two areas of the document.
A follow up phrase search for “information literacy”and “everyday life”(combined using
the AND Boolean operator) within the abstract, title and keyword fields of the documents
and restricted to journal research literature only, resulted to a narrower and more
manageable set of results. In the second round of searching publications were therefore
included in the final set of documents and were considered in this literature review as long
as they were addressing the following criteria:
(1) They were discussing the everyday life context (e.g. a few publications were
excluded because the emphasis was on professional groups, such as health
professionals or university students’academic information needs).
(2) They were discussing implications for IL and they addressed areas beyond
examining ISB or the mere development of ICT skills. Instead, they
were encompassing IL skills such as critical evaluation, sharing and use of
information. For example, a publication by Counts and Fisher (2010), which
was excluded from the final list, discussed ELIL, as “fluency of use of such
technologies as e-mail, the web, and the Slam mobile software application to access
information”(p. 106).
(3) They reported empirical research findings based on collecting and analysing
primary research data. Therefore, articles that purely dealt with methodological
issues and conceptual papers were excluded, although prominent theoretical
papers and works that contributed conceptually to the themes of the literature
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