Archives as the prologues of information literacy

Through analysing how information literate practitioners emerged in the pre-digital era, how they were taught and how they communicated their understandings of practice, we can better appreciate how these actors helped shape contemporary information landscapes. Such studies can be conducted through the resources in special collections of libraries and archives. Case studies of medieval scholarly practice, and the history of the island of St Helena, are presented as examples of where these archival sources reveal the influence of historic information (literate and illiterate) practice on modern information landscapes.