Editorial

Passing the “Annotated Bibliography Information Literacy” Baton

The annual, comprehensive bibliography of information literacy and library instruction literature is a mainstay of Reference Services Review. Consistently and heavily downloaded even years after publication, it provides practitioners, managers and administrators with a review of the current literature of information literacy and library instruction, providing, in effect, a view of the state of the art.

This year marks the 44th anniversary of RSR’s publication of this core resource, and of a relationship that started with 29 entries in our second volume in 1974. The bibliography, and the decades of value it has brought to the profession, began with the pioneering work of Hannelore Rader, a visionary and evangelist for bibliographic instruction who created the first of our information literacy (IL) bibliographies, compiled and shepherded subsequent ones, and inspired the librarians at University of Louisville to continue this effort to the present.

We would like to thank Anna Marie Johnson and Latisha Reynolds and their colleagues at the University of Louisville for their commitment to this work over the years – work which is painstaking and time-consuming. We commend the quality of their research and recognize their conscientious approach to reviewing the literature; compiling the list of citations to a variety of materials, including books, articles and documents; and preparation of descriptive annotations, annotations which inform the reader of the relevance, accuracy and quality of the sources cited.

In short, Johnson, Reynolds and their colleagues have mastered the annotated bibliography, and we are all the richer for it! While it is impossible to measure their contributions to academic and research library development, downloads and citations affirm the continuing significance and influence of their work.

Anna Marie Johnson and her colleagues at University of Louisville are going to pass the IL Bibliography baton to a former colleague of theirs, Tessa Withorn, who, with her new colleagues at California State University Dominguez Hills, will continue this critically important tradition.