The Data Literacy Cookbook. Kelly Getz and Meryl Brodsky, eds. Chicago, IL: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2022. 256p. Paper, $82.00 (ISBN: 978-0-8389-3925-3).

Broadly speaking, data literacy is the ability to locate, interpret, assess, and ethically use data in all its formats. Though data literacy has been a topic in the field for quite some time, more attention has developed over the past few years as data literacy becomes a necessary skill for researchers at all levels. As information types expand and exposure to all of this information continues to increase, students will benefit from learning data literacy skills to succeed in their studies and future professions. Libraries are widely revered as entities for teaching information literacy. Data literacy is relatively new for many teaching librarians who have needed to add it to their repertoire.

The Association of College and Research Libraries’ series of professional development cookbooks has become a staple among librarians sharing with and gaining knowledge from their peers around a wide variety of useful topics. The latest installment presents data literacy and covers an array of practical and adaptable methods for teaching and working with data. In The Data Literacy Cookbook, editors Kelly Getz and Meryl Brodsky curate readings that address the gathering, storing, interpreting, and presentation of data in easily digestible and modifiable formats. The contributing authors present activities, workshops, programs, courses, and curricula designed to increase data literacy skills of students and other library stakeholders at institutions of higher education. This Cookbook comes at a time when students are encountering more data than ever before and are themselves creating data across the disciplines. Students need to understand the data life cycle more comprehensively.

The Cookbook includes nine themed sections that are fashioned in a way that allows readers to choose the areas of data literacy most pertinent to them to teach at a given point of need. These sections are “Interpreting Polls and Surveys,” “Finding and Evaluating Data,” “Data Manipulation and Transformation,” “Data Visualization,” “Data Management and Sharing,” “Geospatial Data,” “Data in the Disciplines,” “Data Literacy Outreach and Engagement,” and “Data Literacy Programs and Curricula.” The recipes in each section follow a standard format that contains nutrition information, target audience, objectives, cooking time, dietary guidelines, ingredients, preparation, instructions, and assessment. Some recipes include additional sections such as chef’s notes and allergy warnings to inform readers of other aspects to keep in mind. While contributing authors provide a variety of formats for delivering data information literacy instruction, they all share a connection to the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy, demonstrating how librarians can apply the Framework to many types of literacies. Each section includes a range of examples for teaching data information literacy; however, the “Finding and Evaluating Data” and “Data Visualization” sections are the most robust and contain more recipes than the others. This emphasizes that within the literacy field finding, evaluating, and disseminating data are most important. But this also communicates that there are other areas that many generalist librarians tasked with teaching data information literacy have not traditionally taught or encountered, such as data management and working with data associated with geographic information systems (GIS). For this reason, this Cookbook serves to fill in those knowledge gaps and expand the skills of librarians and their students.

The Data Literacy Cookbook will be beneficial to any librarian teaching data literacy, both new learners and experienced librarians looking for new instructional methods. Connecting back to an initial observation, the editors communicate that the target audiences for the cookbook are “reference librarians, subject specialists, or information literacy librarians” who are often relied on “to provide and promote data literacy instruction” (vii). This intentional approach to addressing and edifying librarians’ knowledge is crucial as the research landscape and access to increasing types of data, especially within disciplines that have not traditionally thought of their unique types of information as data, continue to evolve. And while most of the recipes are designed primarily for undergraduate students, and to a lesser extent graduate students, readers should not neglect early career faculty and researchers, who would also benefit from the activities and programs presented in the Cookbook. —Andrea Malone, University of Houston