Wherever it says Monklands (either Old Monklands or whatever), this is old fashioned. It is Lanarkshire, just east of Glasgow they are talking about.
It is absolutely correct to say that 'Monklands' is old-fashioned. Though is it still sometimes used, for example the Monklands General Hospital.
However old-fashioned place names are still relevant. They are essential information for genealogical research. The reason for this is that older records were collected on the basis of parishes, and later ones by districts which were based on the parishes. This doesn't matter too much if the name of the main modern town or village in a parish is the same as the parish name, for example Hamilton, Shotts, East Kilbride etc.
It does matter a good deal when the main modern place has a different name, and there are several examples of this in Lanarkshire: Airdrie in the parish of New (or East) Monkland, Coatbridge in the parish of Old (or West) Monkland, Motherwell (mostly) in the parish of Dalziel and Wishaw in the parish of Cambusnethan being the most obvious examples.
If your ancestors are from any of these places you will struggle to find them in older records by the modern place names*. You absolutely have to know which parish these places belonged to, and it is also useful to have an idea where parishes were in relation to one another.
See
http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/sct/LKS for useful information about the geography of Lanarkshire.
* If you don't believe this, try searching a transcription of the 1881 census. I have the LDS CD-ROM transcription, and if I put 'John' in the name field and 'Motherwell' as the census city or town, and the result is zero matches. If I replace 'Motherwell' with 'Dalziel' I get 974 matches. I get 2614 Johns in New Monkland, 3675 in Old Monkland and 1897 in Cambusnethan, but none in Airdrie, Coatbridge or Wishaw.
