Information Literacy Advocacy - Woody's Ten Commandments

The author focuses on the importance of the role of the advocate for information literacy practitioners who are given the responsibility of introducing information literacy programs and projects into their organizations—whether as a teacher in an educational context, a teacher in a private sector company context, a policy official in a government program context, or in some other context. The article first traces many of the most important events that led to the information literacy concept historically so that the reader will have some background before coming to the “ten commandments,” a term the author uses to embrace the lessons he has learned over the years, which are relevant to an advocate’s role. In this regard, the author places the concept in an international context, pointing out the key role UNESCO has played, in part because he was directly involved in most of those seminal activities as an organizer and facilitator. Each of ten lessons learned is then taken up briefly, not in any particular order, using an informal and easy-to-understand writing style. One important goal of the article is to emphasize that because information literacy is a relatively “new” concept in the formal sense (albeit under many different labels and terms it has been around for a very long time), and because it uses two words —“information” and “literacy”— that are themselves subject to many different and often confusing interpretations, virtually every information literacy practitioner, even professional librarians very familiar with the concept, too often assume that their audiences, constituents, and clients will readily understand the concept. In the author’s view, that is simply not the case, and therefore the added role of becoming an advocate, not just a teacher, is extremely important if the practitioner is to be successful. 263 woody’s ten commandments/horton Introduction Let’s start by being forthright about what I consider advocacy to mean. Certainly not every reader will agree, but I believe advocacy is much like lobbying. That is, the advocate tries to influence a senior person in a position of authority, or some organization or institution, to adopt his/her viewpoints, proposals, policies, values, concepts, ideas, etc.—in this case, information literacy proposals. Sometimes the advocate succeeds, and his/her target audiences are persuaded to accept their arguments, and they then encourage the advocate to proceed, or at least promise to take a neutral stance until they can see more clearly how things turn out. But sometimes the advocate loses, and s/he is unable to influence others to move to his/her position and act in the way the advocate wants them to act. “That’s the breaks,” or to use another old saw, “It’s all in the game!” By “information literacy advocacy” I mean the actions that one takes to influence decision makers (whether policy makers in governments, business executives in private companies, or administrators in NGOs) to formally, officially, and publicly acknowledge, accept, and act upon proposed information literacy initiatives, in whatever form(s) they may be packaged—as plans, programs, projects, conferences, training workshops, seminars, colloquia, and so forth. Sometimes, one is fortunate to have comrades-in-arms who are empathetic to your side of the argument and are willing to serve as co-conspirators on your advocacy team. But other times, you may be the lone wolf advocate, and will probably, inevitably, feel a bit lonely at times in the role of change agent. Again, those are the breaks, and it’s all in the game. I was asked in this brief article to summarize some of the key lessons I’ve learned from many years spent advocating information literacy endeavors primarily at the international level. However, the lessons learned herein apply equally to endeavors at the regional and national levels, as well as the various subnational level tiers—institutional, organizational, local community, and interpersonal. Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet that will overcome all kinds of resistance, from whomever and from wherever quarters it may come. But hopefully, some of these lessons I’ve learned may strike a familiar chord and help readers faced with trying to advance information literacy initiatives as a protagonist in their own country or institution or local community. Limiting my scope in this article to the international level, I’ll begin by reviewing the background of what has happened (key events, milestones, benchmarks) in the last several decades. Early Information Literacy Advocacy Antecedents Paul Zurkowski, founding president of the U.S. Information Industry Association (IIA), is almost universally credited with coining the term information literacy. It was my privilege and pleasure to know Mr. Zurkowski 264 library trends/fall 2011 during the 1970s soon after the association was organized, and I was at the time employed by the association as a consultant to work on various projects. It is important in our context to note that the IIA was a trade and industry association, not a professional or scientific society. Its membership was composed of many of the major print publishers whose names are still among U.S. publishing industry greats—Prentice-Hall, John Wiley & Sons, McGraw-Hill, etc. Mobile and handheld electronic media were just beginning to make inroads, and personal computers at that time were primitive by comparison to todays. Electronic files, as a “core manipulable electronic information entity,” were just beginning to be employed. The advent of database producers and database distributors in the 1960s and 1970s offered the association its first major wave of new members after the core founding group of print publishers. But soon the database industry began to splinter and establish its own subgroups with their own corresponding membership associations. One of the gnawing problems Zurkowski faced was just explaining what “information industry association” meant. “Why,” many complained, “don’t they admit that the term is really just a new name for what had until then been called a ‘publisher’s association,’ and be done with it!” The word, “information” in the term, these critics claimed, unnecessarily confused the situation because the word was so ambiguous, with so many different meanings, and considered so vague and so abstract, that it hindered more than helped. But Zurkowski persisted in his own advocacy, and slowly, very slowly, over a period of many years, extending into the late 1980s, he gradually was able to win some allies to the view that information was the “coming strategic resource” in a new “Information Age,” and would take the place of crops during the Agrarian Age and machines during the Industrial Age. Readers who have reviewed the history of library and information science will be familiar with these arguments. One strategy Zurkowski employed in his advocacy efforts was to insist that because information products and services, aided and abetted by the exploding ICT technologies, were beginning to multiply a hundred, or a thousand fold, and it therefore was necessary for informed citizens and policy makers to become more “literate” in these information products and services. In sum, Zurkowski told the author more than once that for the first ten years or so of his using the term “information literacy” in nine cases out of ten he would draw blank stares at the worst, or amused indulgence at the best, in what they perceived was a flight of fancy with words. Transition Decade: 1980–1990 I call this period a “transition decade” because during this time ICT technologies were exploding on the scene with such regularity and drama that it was all everybody could do to just keep up with the newest major ad265 woody’s ten commandments/horton vances cascading year after year. Thus, to pick just one simple example, the earliest and clumsiest word processing machines such as the Lexitron (absolute marvels at the time, but looking back, would be considered clunkers now) were evolving into the earliest PCs, but at that time could do little more than crunch numbers and words like super, but mindless robots. Applications were exploding as well, and every discipline and sector began to launch its own customized information products and services, tailored to their own unique needs and ways of collecting, organizing, summarizing, recording, communicating, and using data and information. Several key events took place during this decade. For one, the Information Industry Association itself metamorphosed into a kind of association federation with various subdivisions and special interest groups, in order to keep up with the exponential growth of computer-assisted information products and services. For another, the federal government set up a new policy-level organization to advise the president and the Congress on libraries and information science, called the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS). This body undertook several studies that touched directly upon information literacy, especially as it related to improving the dissemination of government information to the public. Finally, in 1987 the president of the library community’s largest professional organization, the American Library Association, launched a Presidential Task Force on Information Literacy. The task force issued its final report in 1989. Additional information is provided below on the recommendations of this task force. Librarians, Information Companies, Government, and NGOs Partner: 1990–2000 The library and information science (LIS) community had always been somewhat of a “polite adversary” to the information industry for various reasons, not the least of which was their advocacy of the idea that information should be a “free good” and therefore any attempt to place a price tag on information products was a bit suspect at best, or downright immoral at worst. To that end, libraries and librarians advocated tirelessly to IIA members, in particular to the print publishers, for cheaper subscription rates for books and serials. To a certain extent this author certainly agrees that some information goods should be considered a public good and at least subsidized with taxpayer funds, especially government information. But much information is subject to proprietary laws, rules, and regulations, such as patents, copyrights, trademarks, etc., not to mention business trade secrets, government national security information, and privacy safeguarded information on citizens. In short, there has been, and always will be a tension between these “free information” public rights on the one hand, and various information protection safeguards on the other hand. 266 library trends/fall 2011 At the same time, at the beginning of this decade, government was very slow to even acknowledge the rapid emergence and proliferation of many different kinds of “information professionals,” each crying out to be formally and officially recognized by the federal government as a separate and distinct entity in the government’s “job bible”—the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. In short, those incumbents campaigned that if they were ever to realize full career potential, given the risks they took to enter the new ICT (information and communication technology)-assisted fields, and the need for peer recognition, competitive pay and benefits, and so on, the government would have to formally and officially recognize their new position titles. Even in the closely related computer science sphere, for decades official government job titles were based on early 1950s and 1960s state of computer-assisted information handling technologies. For example, “automatic data processing,” or ADP, took decades to make the simple metamorphosis into EDP or “electronic data processing.” Data entry clerks were about as far as the Department of Labor (the high priest of job titles) was prepared to go to update its master job category lists until the early 1980s. Then there was the coining of the term “informatics” to refer to the blending of information and computers. However, as we write these words, this term has lapsed into widespread disfavor, which, again, underscores the career risks being taken by those courageous enough to enter the new ICT field. At the same time libraries and librarians were increasingly frustrated with trying to keep up with what they called “user education.” That is, training their patrons so that they could efficiently utilize the newer information products and services becoming available. “User education” just didn’t seem to do the trick, and they began to search for a more meaningful term. Ultimately information literacy, in more and more institutions and organizations, began to inherit the terminological mantle of what had been for generations “user education.” The American Library Association Presidential Task Force on Information Literacy As mentioned above, the American Library Association president appointed a task force on information literacy in 1987 and it issued a final report in 1989. The task force was charged with investigating the concept of information literacy, not just in the context of librarianship and higher education as might have been expected, but also the relationship of the concept to individuals, business, and citizenship (American Library As-