National Information Literacy Coalition Advocacy Project

A major activity has been establishing a process to assess the feasibility of a national coalition to advocate for information literacy among the education, government and corporate sectors. We have obtained a small amount of funds to support this and formed a 'mini' coalition with the National Library of Australia and a key government agency - the National Office for the Information Economy. This agency has a remit to address issues on the 'digital divide' among other functions. The funds have enabled us to employ the respected Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) (http://www.acer.edu.au) to conduct the feasibility study and report.

The final report [full-text 700KB PDF] on the feasibility of a national coalition has been received. The steering committee is in the process of developing a communication/action strategy in order to advance it. The research group ACER carried out a global search for a parallel body and was unable to locate any apart from the US National Information Literacy Forum. They also surveyed over 90 organisations and spoke to 20 of these in detail. The report will be released toward the end of the year.

Please contact Prue Mercer, pmercer@slv.vic.gov.au, if you have any queries.

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