What is information literacy and why is it important?

As defined by The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, ‘Information literacy is knowing when and why you need information, where to find it, and how to evaluate, use and communicate it in an ethical manner.’ This means finding and using information in all sorts of contexts, such as:

• school pupils looking for information for a project
• students finding information for an essay
• unemployed people looking on the internet for jobs
• people in work looking for information to develop their skills
• people with a long term medical condition looking for information about their condition
• people at work trying to solve a problem
• people planning holidays

All these types of people need the skills to know where to find the information they need, to decide how reliable it is and how they can use it for their own purposes. They also need to know about ethical issues, for example not passing off information you have found as your own and not stealing other people’s intellectual property by buying illegal CDs or making illegal downloads from the internet. Information literacy originated in higher education and used to be viewed as a rather specialised academic issue but that is no longer the case. As the recent Referendum debate has shown, people all over Scotland looked for information to help them decide in all sorts of ways, such as watching television, using Twitter, reading books, periodicals and internet sources, listening to the arguments of canvassers on the doorstep or just by talking to their friends.

information literacy is vital to a democratic society

This has demonstrated that information literacy is vital to a democratic society. It also highlighted a few problems, for example many people were reported as saying they did not have enough information, even though there was plenty available. The problem was they did not know where to look for it or understand how to interpret it once they had found it. Whilst information literacy is a valuable tool when it comes to increasing political engagement, in the immediate future the emphasis is likely to be on information literacy as an aid to help people find jobs, and a skill for keeping up to date once people are in work. The information literacy community of practice was founded in 2012 to promote information literacy in all sectors of Scottish life. Membership was originally drawn mainly from the information sector but we now have members in the education and skills sectors. We work with other relevant bodies such as the Scottish Library and Information Council and the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations. The digital participation agenda and the role of information literacy within it has become a big part of our work and we are keen to work with all those promoting the digital agenda. In particular we are focusing on the Scottish Government’s decision to devolve training to voluntary agencies like SCVO and we are keen to see that the voluntary sector learns about information literacy and develops the skills to be able to take on an information literacy training role.