ALIA Information Literacy Forum

Exploring information literacy meaning

29 August 2003

Into the broader context: exploring information literacy meaning

This paper presents the Interim National Council for Information Literacy Advocacy definition of an information literate person as a starting point for discussion. It then offers a definition-in-progress for consideration, one that aims at conceptualising the meaning of information literacy in the context of the workplace. The paper then suggests that information literacy is currently thought of as an objective and systematic process of skills acquisition, rather than a process which is influenced by social, political and historical knowledge which defines an organisational space such as the workplace. A number of questions are woven through the paper and you are invited to use these as the basis for discussion.

Defining information literacy - Interim National Council for Information Literacy Advocacy

The Interim National Council for Information Literacy Advocacy has proposed a working definition that encompasses the effective use of a range of information technologies to develop skills for life long learning within the context of the workplace and community:

'An information literate person recognises when information is needed and can locate, access, evaluate and apply that information.'

Information literacy:

• Encompasses the effective use of multiple information technologies and formats
• Enables individuals to develop skills for life long learning; and
• Supports skills for workplace enterprise and for community participation'

(Mercer and Kiley 2003, p6)

However, the final report [PDF, 696KB] from the feasability study for the development of a national coaltion also strongly indicates that a definition which 'better suits the needs of different stakeholders in the field of information literacy is required'.

A synthesis of definitions published over the last thirty years indicates that the focus to date has been on defining information literacy as process and skill acquisition, rather than conceptualising what it means to be information literate (Bruce (1996) is a notable exception). Webber and Johnston (2000) suggest that the majority of definitions share common elements, such as information seeking, informed choice of information sources, evaluation, and selection. The view of information literacy as 'one process fits all' has similarities with the autonomous view of literacy. This view assumes that once a defined set of skills are learnt they will fit a person as they move into the complex and diverse world of the workplace (Searle 2003).

Currently, our thinking about information literacy is influenced by the practices of librarians and teacher-librarians in the tertiary and secondary educational sectors. This thinking is organised around librarians' understanding of textual and digital works as access points to knowledge acquisition, and assumes that becoming information literate is largely an objective and unproblematic process. This suggestion is supported by Rader's (2002) recent review of information literacy publications in the US and other countries (including Australia). Rader (2002, p24) reports that most research into information literacy is firmly based in the academic sector (60 per cent), followed by school-based instruction (20 per cent).

As valuable as this research is to our emerging understanding and conceptualisation of information literacy, it also has the effect of standardising our thinking about what information literacy is outside the tertiary and secondary educational sectors, how information literacy process manifests in workplaces and how the process is affected by social relations which constitute the workplace as a social space.

In developing a more comprehensive definition of information literacy, five questions are raised. It is anticipated that this definition, which does not privilege the educational view of information literacy, can then be used by a range of advocates of information literacy as a critical competency in workplace and educational learning.

• What does it mean to an individual to be information literate outside of the educational context?
• What information processes and strategies are required?
• How does the instructional information literacy process employed by schools and academic institutions relate to the range of information strategies and practices in a variety of workplaces?
• What are the implications for librarians employed by community, or business and industry sectors in championing information literacy outside the educational sectors?
• How will the groups (identified in the previous question) measure the success of information literacy education across a broad spectrum of community interests and needs?

Conceptualising information literacy within the workplace

My doctoral research is an investigation of what it means to be information literate, and how information literacy manifests itself within a community of practice. The study focuses on how firefighters in a specific social space (the fire station) access and use information to construct meaningful social and procedural information practices and knowledge, through their training and relationships with each other and the activities of the workplace

Offering an alternative definition

The definition offered here is a definition-in-progress. It attempts to conceptualise what it means to be information literate in a specific workplace. Conceptualising information literacy leads to the following working definition:

An information literate person has a deep awareness, connection and fluency with the information environment. Information literate people are engaged, enabled, enriched, and embodied by social, procedural and physical information that constitutes an information universe. Information literacy is a way of knowing that universe (Lloyd 2003 in progress)

Discussion

By attempting to understand what it means to be information literate in a wide variety of contexts, it becomes possible to develop and implement information literacy education that helps the individual to develop contextually relevant information literacy activities. It also becomes possible to develop outcomes and measures that are appropriate for the specific context.

This approach to thinking about the information literate as embodied and of information literacy as an enabling and engaging process, recognises that becoming information literate and developing information literacy practice is dependent on:

• Identifying the differences in the way explicit and tacit knowledge is distributed within an organisation
• How it is accessed;
• How access is influenced by the social, historical and political processes that influence the workplace as a social space; and
• how the process skills of information literacy become subconsciously and fluently integrated over-time into automatic practice (embodied)

The consequence for librarians who support an information literacy agenda outside the school and university sectors is that information literacy may need to be taught or modelled in ways that do not reflect the current pedagogic process of information literacy instruction which represent information literacy as 'unproblematic, atheoretical, and apolitical' (Kapitzke 2003, p47).

It has become apparent through the initial analysis of my research with firefighters that information literacy is not a separate activity of skills acquisition and application. It is an enabling process that results in the person becoming engaged and aware of the paths, nodes and edges of an information landscape leading eventually to information fluency and knowledge of that landscape. Through engagement with information derived from a variety of textual and socially distributed information sources, the individual becomes embodied and comes to know the workplace, its practices and its tensions.

Rather than being exclusively text-based, workplace information literacy is also dependent on the social interactions of the workplace, and underpins informal workplace learning. Experienced practitioners who have a deeper understanding of where information is located, and of the most effective ways to access and acquire information within the workplace, mediate the information literacy process for novices. Experienced individuals act as primary information sources and model information behaviour that is observed and then rehearsed by novice fire-fighters. Whilst print and digital information sources are important in this specific workplace environment, the primary source is other people (within the community of practitioners) who have a deep awareness and understanding, not only of procedural practice, but also of the social, historical and political contexts which affect information transmission and acquisition within the workplace.

In coming to know how, or with whom, information is situated, the individual over time becomes embodied by information. The emerging information literate practitioner develops a sense of perspective and identity that relates to their place and practice. The way we define ourselves is dependent on our interaction with contextual information. This constitutes the discourse of the collective with which we are engaged. To make this point clearer, think about how you identify yourself to others: I am a parent; I am a librarian, a teacher; a welder; a student; or a firefighter. This interaction is not isolated, but dependent on our relationship with the stateable domains of knowledge and our relationship with others as sources of tacit knowledge within specific contexts.

Therefore, the issues become:

• Does being information literate in one context mean that we are information literate in all contexts?
• How transferable are information literacy skills into the public library or workplace settings? A secondary question which has been previously asked (Lloyd 2003) is;
• how will the success of information literacy skills be measured in contexts other than educational contexts? This is an important question in an information society where key drivers are measurement and outcome.

A primary role for librarians and information professionals is to facilitate the information literacy process to enable the people who are our clients to develop the skills, which will allow engagement with information and contextual enrichment. This initial analysis suggests that librarians and information educators need to have a clearer understanding of the diversity of the workplace and to develop models of information literacy instruction in a way that replicates the information practices and strategies of workplaces and community organisations. It is then up to the individual to employ these skills to become engaged and empowered by information in their context whether it be the workplace, education or home life.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics Yearbook (2002), 27 per cent of Australians have been involved with tertiary education programs, and therefore, presumably have had access to some form of information literacy education. Outside the educational context, the librarians' task becomes one of facilitating information literacy to a clientele, who may not have had access to educationally driven information literacy programs. Understanding what it means to be information literate, and how information literacy 'as process' manifests itself in the workplace, will require librarians in all settings to explore workplaces within their communities to identify information practice and processes.

The alternative definition offered here is a definition-in-progress. The final outcome may be modified by further research into information literacy in the broader context beyond the educational environment. The strength of this alternative definition lies in its 'fit' which enables others to conceptualise the information literate as an individual empowered in the community in which they live, work, study or play. Information literacy as a process can then be advocated as an empowering tool, which enables the individual to become enriched in a range of contexts, not just in an educational context. By understanding what it means to be information literate, advocacy for information literacy as a critical literacy underpinning all activities of the knowledge economy is possible.

Several questions

If this alternative definition of what it means to be information literate is accepted, a set of questions needs to be considered:

1. What role do librarians have in assisting individuals to become enabled, engaged, and enriched outside the educational context?
2. Are librarians the engineers who will drive and advocate information literacy in the workplace or other community sectors? If they are, can they do this alone? What other groups of people should be engaged in this process?
3. How then will such processes be evaluated or measured?

Annemaree Lloyd

As this paper is still draft form, no part of the paper is to be cited.

References

Lonsdale, M, Fleming, M and Lenoard, R 2002, Feasibility study for the development of a National Coalition for Information Literacy Advocacy, electronic version, viewed 18 May 2003.

Australian Bureau of Statistics 2002, Australia Year Book, electronic version, ABS, Canberra.

Bruce, C 1996, Seven faces of information literacy, Aslib, Adelaide.

Kapitzke, C 2003, 'Information literacy: A positivist epistemology and politics of outformation, Educational theory, vol 35, no 1,pp. 37-53.

Lloyd, A 2003(in press), Information Literacy: the meta-competency of the knowledge economy? An exploratory paper, Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 35 (2), pp 87-91

Mercer, P and Kiley, D 2003, 'Power your mind!', inCite, Australian Library and Information Association, March, vol 24, no 3,p. 6.

Rader, H 2002, 'Information Literacy 1973-2002: A selected review', Library Trends, vol 51,no 2, pp. 242-259.

Searle, J 2003, 'Developing literacy', in Developing vocational expertise; Principles and issues in vocational education, J. Stevenson (ed.), Allen and Unwin, London.

Webber, S and Johnston, B 2000, 'Conceptions of information literacy: New perspectives and implications', Journal of Information Science, vol 26,no 6,pp. 381-387.

My thanks to Annemaree for a stimulating kickoff to the forum. i found your paper very interesting and it certainly broadened my perspective on information literacy.

I was at first puzzled by the use of the word 'embodied'. I'd appreciate if you could comment more on that idea. I can certainly see that information is a vital component of who we are. It potentially expands the boundaries of information literacy so far that I can't imagine how we would then contain it to a useful space.

I warmed to the inclusion of workplace interactions and understanding of how information is distributed in the workplace. I recently set a couple of more recent arrivals in my section the task of analyzing a cross-departmental project to see who had power, influence and knowledge pertaining to it so that they could better understand the dynamics of moving the project forward. Often this sort of knowledge is needed to be a productive and constructive worker. This is tangent, but if you are interested in it Bolman, L.G. and Deal, T.E., 2000, Escape from Cluelessness: A Guide for the organisationally Challenged, New York, Amacom is a good read.

I can't quite imagine how Annemaree's broad perspective would be applied in a university library, but could imagine a corporate knowledge manager using this.

Julia Leong
Access services librarian
Dixson Library
University of New England

I can't quite imagine how Annemaree's broad perspective would be applied in a university library...

I think one of the big issues in information literacy is how do we achieve lifelong learning, or an information literate individual that can cope with all kinds of problems (as the concept was initially defined by Zurkowski in 1974). Universities have an obligation to graduate individuals that have a certain set of skills, but does that obligation extend to providing work-ready skills?

If so, then workplace conceptions of information literacy become important to university librarians, as they may then need to equip students with workplace information literacy skills. This would differ from the kinds of skills that librarians teach for students to deal with university course problems, in particular in terms of complex problem solving (solving projects and ongoing problems instead of linear essays) and social cognition (solving problems in a team as opposed to writing essays individually).

The transition from university to work is a difficult one, and is made more so because the responsibility for where people should learn these sorts of skills is unclear. Many occupations and professions are taking the approach that education is the responsibility of the individual, not the organisation and so they are expected to have these skills when they get a job. So where do they get these skills?

I agree with Annemaree's description of information literacy as an enabling process, and a social process. It seems unfeasable to think of the current set of information literacy standards as defined by CAUL, which are designed for individuals, and to apply them to teams in which people may only perform parts of the information seeking, analysis or use process.

I researched information literacy instruction for journalists for my master's thesis. On reading Annemaree's paper I have found that some of the problems found were the same, in particular the question of how information literacy in higher education relates to the workplace, how is success measured, and understanding more about how information is used in different organisations.

I found that where information literacy skills are being provided by librarians to journalists, they have very little time to prepare such classes, it is mostly on a one-to-one basis, and librarians themselves say that they need more train-the-trainer instruction. The need for cost benefits hampered the availability of training in some organisations. It's near impossible to put the outcomes of information literacy in dollar terms.

Lastly, I think it's fantastic that more research is being done in this area, I'm looking forward to reading more of Annemaree's research. Information literacy is not well understood outside of schools or higher education, and given the emphasis on lifelong learning in the concept, it is very important that we know more about the way people seek, use, and analyse information in these environments.

Fiona Bradley
SBS Radio Resource Centre