495

Book Reviews

Collaborative Information Literacy As-
sessments: Strategies for Evaluating 
Teaching and Learning. Eds. Thomas 
P. Mackey and Trudi E. Jacobson. 
New York: Neal-Schuman Publish-
ers, 2010. 242p. alk. paper, $85 (ISBN 
9781555706937). LC2009-045950.

The research and best practices in infor-
mation literacy instruction indicate that 
instruction is more effective when embed-
ded, integrated, and assessed within the 
context of the course curriculum. This 
pedagogical approach to library instruc-
tion requires close collaboration with 
teaching faculty, and it is these collab-
orative methods of information literacy 
assessment that Thomas P. Mackey and 
Trudi E. Jacobson address in their new 
book, Collaborative Information Literacy 
Assessments: Strategies for Evaluating Teach-
ing and Learning. Editors Jacobson and 
Mackey are established experts in infor-
mation literacy best practices, with two 
other books addressing related topics. 
Providing snapshots of librarian-faculty 
teams partnering to design and imple-
ment information literacy assessment 
practices, this book will appeal to instruc-
tion librarians looking for a practical and 
informative guide to collaborative assess-
ment in action.

The book is organized into three dis-
ciplinary areas—Business, Social Science 
and Education, and Humanities—and 
each section contains two or three chap-
ters. Mackey and Jacobson introduce 
each section with chapter summaries and 
practical suggestions for applying the 
collaborative approaches outlined in each 
chapter. Librarian-faculty teams author 
each chapter, and all chapters generally 
follow the same format: introduction, 
a literature review, a description of the 
institutional context, a description of 
the collaborative approach to informa-
tion literacy assessment, assessment of 
the model, and a conclusion. Appen-

dices provide examples of 
the actual assessment tools, 
and tables throughout the 
chapters graphically depict 
assessment findings. 

While the disciplinary 
approach to organization 
provides a useful framework for navigat-
ing the book, it is worth noting that the 
assessment models and tools described 
in each chapter case study have the po-
tential to be adapted to just about any 
subject or setting. The techniques and 
approaches to assessment in this volume 
range from summative to formative, 
from multiple-choice knowledge tests 
to rubrics to student self-assessment of 
information literacy skills. And, as the 
editors contend, these models are indeed 
portable. In chapter 1, librarian Casey M. 
Long and professor of finance Milind M. 
Shrikhande describe the citation analysis 
assessment tool they developed for use in 
business classes. However, librarians and 
instructors in writing classes could also 
employ this assessment method, for ex-
ample. Similarly, the information literacy 
self-assessment technique developed by 
librarian Leslie Bussert and professor of 
English Norm Pouliot for use in writing 
courses, discussed in chapter 6, could be 
adapted for use in business information 
literacy instruction.

Assessment of student learning is a 
topic of increasing importance in higher 
education, and many library instruction 
programs must provide evidence of learn-
ing in response to institutional initiatives 
and accrediting bodies. As information 
literacy becomes further integrated into 
college and university curricula and, 
in some cases, is institutionalized as a 
general education learning outcome, Ja-
cobson and Mackey’s volume will provide 
a necessary and valuable intervention 
for library instruction programs seeking 
straightforward and adaptable examples 



496 College & Research Libraries September 2010

of real-life assessment in practice. Instruc-
tion librarians and coordinators will find 
helpful assessment models to follow in 
this volume. The assessment tools de-
scribed in this book are not necessarily 
new and different; rather, what differ-
entiates this volume is how the assess-
ment tools are used in faculty-librarian 
partnerships, so this book will especially 
be informative and practical for librarians 
seeking to partner with teaching faculty to 
enhance and assess information literacy 
learning.—Maria T. Accardi, Indiana Uni-
versity Southeast.

Julian Warner. Human Information Re-
trieval. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 
2010. 189p. alk. paper, $35 (ISBN 
9780262013444). LC2009-010120.

In Human Information Retrieval, Julian 
Warner, a faculty member in the Man-
agement School of Queen’s University 
at Belfast with a long-standing interest 
in the intersection of humanistic and 
technological approaches to information 
systems, undertakes the ambitious project 
of rethinking the theoretical framework 
of information retrieval (IR). Judging 
traditional approaches to the topic as 
being overly limited in their concerns or 
based on theories insufficiently congru-
ent to real-world practice, he seeks to 
develop a comprehensive perspective 
on IR that both acknowledges its human 
dimensions and gives a theoretically 
adequate account of currently dominant 
retrieval practices. Over the course of nine 
chapters, Warner unfolds this agenda 
by (1) outlining a new approach to IR 
centered around the concept of human 
labor and (2) articulating a rationale for 
full-text retrieval, which, in his view, is the 
characteristic modality of IR deployed in 
information technologies today.

After an introductory chapter, in which 
he carefully outlines the trajectory of ar-
gument for the book as a whole, Warner 
devotes three chapters to an explication 
of his labor-theoretic approach to IR. In 
his view, enhancement of selection power, 
defined as “the human ability to make 

choices between objects or representa-
tions of objects,” is the primary aim and 
core value of IR. Selection power depends 
upon selection labor, the mental work that 
goes into the processes of discriminating 
between objects and choosing between 
them. Although selection labor is an activ-
ity of the human mind, some of its pro-
cesses can be supported by and, in part, 
transferred to information technologies. 
Such transfers are possible, in Warner’s 
estimation, because these technologies 
are themselves the products of human 
labor and designed with specifically hu-
man purposes in mind: historically, there 
has been a tendency to delegate as many 
processes of human labor as possible to 
technological tools.

Selection labor can be further subdivid-
ed into two mutually exclusive types: de-
scription labor and search labor. Descrip-
tion labor is the material and mental work 
expended in “transforming objects (docu-
ments, images, or people) into searchable 
descriptions that will assist subsequent 
retrieval,” whereas its converse, search la-
bor, is the material and mental work spent 
in searching for objects in an information 
system. In a library setting, for example, 
the cataloger preparing (or modifying) a 
catalog record is engaging in description 
labor, while the user posing a query to 
an online catalog or a search of engine is 
involved in search labor. 

Crosscutting the distinction between 
description labor and search labor is a 
further distinction between semantic and 
syntactic labor. Semantic labor is mental 
labor pertaining to the production and 
determination of meaning, while syntactic 
labor is mental labor used to carry out 
operations based on pattern matching 
and the manipulation of symbols. Both 
descriptive and search labor have seman-
tic and syntactic components: for instance, 
the assignment of an index term to a docu-
ment requires semantic description labor 
and the arrangement of a set of records 
into a series by the alphabetical order 
of their entry terms involves syntactic 
description labor, whereas translating a