No man (or woman) is an island: information literacy, affordances and communities of practice

Abstract

Current understandings of information literacy are drawn from research within library and educational contexts, in which information literacy is identified as a suite of skills that facilitate the learning process. In these contexts, information literacy education focuses on information discovery through the development of a systematic set of skills which result in individual competency. This view of information literacy is questioned by recent research into workplace information literacy which indicates that, when learning is informal or unstructured, acquiring information literacy becomes a collaborative process aimed at developing collective competency. Understanding how information literacy is manifest in the workplace will assist librarians in higher education institutions to develop programs that assist with the transfer of skills from an educational setting to the workplace.