Lombard, Emmett. Pursuing Information Literacy: Roles and Relationships. Oxford: Chandos Publishing, 2010. 164 pp. ISBN 9781843345909. Soft cover, $75.00

Ladonna Guillot, Southeastern Louisiana University

Emmett Lombard’s Pursuing Information Literacy: Roles and Relationships is an ambitious effort to examine the role of information literacy in the business, health care, media, government, justice, defense, and education sectors. However, while the scope of the book is extensive, depth is lacking: The definition and history of information literacy are summarized in less than three pages. A chapter is devoted to each of the aforementioned topics and provides a brief analysis of the role of information literacy within the field. Lombard looks at information seekers and providers and probes the responsibility of each, but at times leaves the reader confused when he transforms seekers into providers, and vice versa. 
To his credit, however, Lombard does aptly apply his four components of information literacy (identify, locate, analyze, use) to each area. He also interjects interesting interviews with professionals within each field: a newspaper editor, a police officer, a judge, a hospital administrator, an army captain, and a professor, and his choice of multinational interview subjects provides perspective on the global relevancy of information literacy (The eye opener for librarians might be that information literacy is a term generally unfamiliar to many who daily identify, analyze, and apply information). Each of Lombard’s chapters concludes with tips for the purveyors and consumers of information literacy, respective to the field discussed, but some of these may cause the reader to wince: In the chapter on health care, he makes the questionable recommendation to medical practitioners that “it is good bedside manner to respect the intelligence of patients, but irresponsible to allow them to be too engaged in the information literacy process.” In the chapter on justice, Lombard advises readers not to break the law. He advises students to “learn for the sake of learning,” and tells parents they are “responsible for their children’s learning.” At best mundane, some of the tips appear biased or irrelevant.
Lombard is a librarian and English instructor at Gannon University, and he prides himself on incorporating information literacy into all aspects of his work. His passion for information literacy is obvious, and he rightly asserts the Information Age provides equal opportunity to charlatans as well as legitimate information providers. His theme, that information literacy no longer belongs solely to the library world, is well intentioned and adequately developed, and despite its drawbacks, for some readers Pursuing Information Literacy may be helpful in that it provides an overview of information literacy beyond the library and classroom. That being said, many will find that the soft cover retail price of $75.00, especially given the text’s various problems, is just too much to pay in these challenging economic times.