The Concept of Information Literacy in Policy- Making Texts: An Imperialistic Project?

Pilerot, Ola; Lindberg, Jenny

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/31880 Copy

Description

Title

The Concept of Information Literacy in Policy- Making Texts: An Imperialistic Project?

Author(s)

• Pilerot, Ola
• Lindberg, Jenny

Issue Date

2011

Keyword(s)

Information literacy

Abstract

Organizations such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) put a lot of effort in advocacy and policy making for information literacy (IL). Their ambition to foster IL can be seen as a part of a multinational educational project. By exporting a Western IL model focused on textual information sources and the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) into non-Western contexts that to a great extent lack ICTs, the educational project for IL runs the risk of turning into an imperialistic project. A discursively oriented analysis of two prominent policy documents—discussed in the light of the so-called new imperialism and the idea of invisible technologies—indicates a standardized onesize- fits-all-model of IL. Through establishing a close contact between the policy-making strand and the research strand in the IL literature and by adhering to the broad concept of information literacies, the risk of imperialism and oppression might lessen.

Publisher

Johns Hopkins University Press and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

ISSN

0024-2594

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/31880

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2011.0040

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2011 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.

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