Library and Information Research Volume 34 Number 106 2010 _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________ C.Heppell 37 LLOYD, Annemaree. Literacy information landscapes: information literacy in education, workplace and everyday contexts. Oxford: Chandos Publishing. 2010. 200 pages. ISBN 978-1-84334-507-7. £45.00. As practitioners in information literacy, it is all too easy to become ensconced in our own everyday practice and not think about the broader issues of exactly what it is and its place outside of formal learning. We talk a lot about the Holy Grail of embedding these skills into everyday life but never reach a full and informed consensus across the board. We quibble about definitions on information literacy and worry about where the future of librarianship lies but, Lloyd argues, if we ‘continue to impose a library-centric view on the information literacy skills debate, we will find that we continue to lack relevance to the world outside of librarianship’. This book (a follow on from doctoral research), is aimed at ‘information literacy researchers, librarians and educators who are interested in the ways people experience an information environment’, Lloyd (Senior Lecturer in the School of Information Studies, Charles Stuart University, Wagga Wagga, NSW, Australia), seeks to expand our thinking and place information literacy, as a catalyst for learning, in the context of a socio-cultural ‘meta-practice’; something that is embedded in every part of our lives and is context dependent by the ‘landscape’ we find ourselves in at the time of need. The landscape may be related to our working lives, education or a particular circumstance such as a health issue, but all have a foundation based on human interaction and have evolved over time to include ‘social, historical, political and economic layers’. Lloyd gives an example from a study of fire fighters (Lloyd-Zantiotis 2004) to highlight this theory: a novice fire fighter will begin by acting out the role as a fire fighter but then goes through the process of being guided by experts, who will coach them and scaffold their development. Coupled with reflection on their experience, this enables the novice to transfer from ‘institutionally sanctioned’ information towards a ‘development of collective competencies’ and the ability to ‘speak a fire’. The first part of the book deals with the conceptual orientation the reader will need in order to understand how Lloyd has arrived at her theory of information literacy as meta-practice. It brings together a range of ideas and theories, from the definition of information literacy to discourse on the nature of practice theory and situated learning in context. This chapter draws on academic sources and develops a coherent argument for the broader view of information literacy acting as a catalyst for formal and informal learning but being more than the sum of its parts. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 separate into reviews of the literature and practice taking place in the fields of higher education, the workplace and public libraries respectively (with a small proportion on health literacy), in terms of information literacy. It transpires that HE has had the most activity in research in this area but that the emphasis is on function and individual achievement. Few studies have been carried out on the workplace because of a general lack of knowledge of what information literacy is, exacerbated by the complication that information is not