9 May 2003

Power your mind!

Library and Information Week, 12-18 May 2003

Australian Library and Information Week (LIW) celebrates the tremendous contribution that library and information services, and the specialist staff who work within them, make to educate, inform and entertain all Australians.

The United Nations has proclaimed 2003-2012 as the decade of literacy, and to coincide, LIW 2003 has the theme 'Information literacy: power your mind'.

What is information literacy?
Information literacy is more than being able to read: it means knowing when you need information, knowing where and how to find it, and knowing how to evaluate and use it in your everyday life. Getting information is easy, but how do you know that it is the right information?

Information power
Real information power is having the right information at the right time and applying it to the decisions you make in your work and daily life.

How can you get information power? Visit your library and information service. Talk to your librarian. Where else but your library and information service can you have access to nearly everything on the web or in print, and get assistance to find what you are looking for? Libraries and information services make information affordable, available and accessible to all people. And the professional library staff make accessing all that information easy: they are the ultimate search engines. They know how to find the best information - whether it is in a book, video, pamphlet or on a website. Teaching others how to find and evaluate information is a unique skill that library and information workers bring to our information rich society.

Visit your library
Library and Information Week, 12-18 May, is the perfect opportunity to visit your library and information service, whether it is your local public library, school, university, TAFE, government, corporate, state or national library.

ALIA thanks its sponsor for Library and Information Week 2003, The One Umbrella Pty Ltd, exclusive recruitment agency for the information management industry.