The Concept of Information Literacy in Policy-Making Texts: An Imperialistic Project?
2011 (English)In: Library Trends, ISSN 0024-2594, E-ISSN 1559-0682, Vol. 60, no 2, p. 338-360Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
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.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
The Johns Hopkins University Press , 2011. Vol. 60, no 2, p. 338-360
National Category
Information Studies
Research subject
Library and Information Science
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:hb:diva-3209Local ID: 2320/9696OAI: oai:DiVA.org:hb-3209DiVA, id: diva2:871306
2015-11-132015-11-132018-08-20Bibliographically approved