The early development of information literacy instruction for young people as revealed by six volumes

This paper uses six books to investigate the early history of information literacy (IL) teaching to school-aged young people in the UK. The work was inspired by Neil MacGregor’s Radio Four programme, A History of the World in 100 Objects, which explored humankind’s development via a series of artefacts. In my project, the items were chosen with a view to demonstrating the diverse ways in which information skills were promoted up to the introduction of the National Curriculum in 1989. All the texts selected offer ideas that could directly improve the independent learning of young people; documents that are less practical, such as reviews of the state of the field at the time, lie outside the project’s scope. Although attention is mainly concentrated on the volumes themselves, the profiles of the six works are supported with references to literature that includes other books, reports, articles in professional periodicals and academic papers. My piece concludes by isolating the themes with regard to IL that emerge overall, and looks ahead to some of the changes that would take place in the immediate years to come.