Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

A new Project Information Literacy report by the ever-curious researcher, Alison Head, has just been published, the first in a new “practitioner’s series.”  Planning and Designing Academic Library Learning Spaces involved interviewing 49 librarians, architects, and consultants involved in 22 library construction projects that were completed between 2011 and 2016. The research probes how these three parties negotiate their values and incorporate them into designs, what kinds of learning are these new and renovated spaces meant to support, and what best practices (and worst practices) might inform libraries embarking on a renovation..

I’ve read David Lewis’s wide-angle provocations in the past, so when I picked up his new book, Reimagining the Academic Library, I expected my thoughts to be provoked. Seeing that the first chapter was titled “Disruption” and the first paragraph opened with Clayton Christensen made me think I was merely going to be irritated. Luckily, the second paragraph acknowledges the problems with Christensen’s theory and its all-too-frequently shoddy applications, so I carried on. What follows is well worth reading and discussing.