This is the first part of a report of an investigation on Information Literacy (IL) among final year students in six Malaysian universities in the Klang Valley. The study attempts to measure studentsâ IL competency in key areas, namely, the ability to identify, access, retrieve, evaluate, and organise needed information to achieve certain purposes. A self-administered questionnaire was used as the instrument for data collection, conducted during August and September 2005. Respondents comprised students from 3 main fields, i.e. Science and Technology, Social Science and Humanities, Business and Accountancy. A total of 1,100 responses are used for data analysis. Scores are assigned for identifying levels of competency as: 0 = wrong answer, 1=beginner, 2=intermediate and 3=advanced. Results of the analysis reveal that half (50.1%) of the respondents are at the intermediate IL level while more than one-third (38.4%) are beginners, and slightly more than ten percent (11.5%) can be categorized as at the advanced competency level. Respondents with higher competency levels are those who frequently read materials in English, use the Internet to download programs / software, search databases for aca-demic materials, use the library to read academic journals and discuss academic matters, compared to those who go to the library for other reasons such as to borrow books, meet friends or study. Compulsory information skills courses are found to be related to competency levels, but this relationship is not statistically significant. There is no significant difference in the competency level between those who are currently writing a thesis and those who are not. However, there is a significant difference in IL competency between those who have written assignments in an essay format and those who have not.

Author Requests this citation be used when reproducing: Forest Woody Horton, "Public Access to Government Information and Information Literacy Training as Basic Human Rights," July 2002, White Paper prepared for UNESCO, the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, and the National Forum on Information Literacy, for use at the Information Literacy Meeting of Experts, Prague, The Czech Republic / One of the key critical success factors for a stable democracy is an informed and empowered citizenry. A more formal way of saying this is to proclaim that public information is a strategic resource needed at all levels of society, by all people, and in all walks of life. This paper examines the philosophical concept of why public access to government information should be considered a basic human right, why minimal information literacy skills are necessary to exploit that strategic resource, and why the acquisition of those skills by all citizens should also be treated as a basic human right. The two ideas are essentially an ends and a means. In short, an end (public access to government information), however worthy, but without the means to realize it (information literacy skills) might as well be no end at all.

Information architecture has become one of the latest areas of excitement within the library and information science (LIS) community, largely resulting from the recognition it garners from those outside of the field for the methods and practices of information design and management long seen as core to information science. The term, â â information architectureâ â (IA), was coined by Richard Wurman in 1975 to describe the need to transform data into meaningful information for people to use, a not entirely original idea, but certainly a first-time conjunction of the terms into the now common IA label. Building on concepts in architecture, information design, typography, and graphic design, Wurmanâ s vision of a new field lay dormant for the most part until the emergence of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, when interest in information organization and structures became widespread. The term came into vogue among the broad web design community as a result of the need to find a way of communicating shared interests in the underlying organization of digitally accessed information.

This chapter is from an invited presentation (15 pages long) given at the Aachen Colloquium on Click - A Split World, November 2004. It has appeared in the book [Gespaltene Welt? Technikzugange in der Wissensgesellschaft, edited by Max Kerner and Thomas Muller, and published by Bohlau Verlag, Koln, 2006] and is the author's final version. Introduction: I am asked to reflect on social and cultural consequences of technical development and try to answer a few questions: â ¢ In what different kind of ways access to knowledge is modified in an information technology-based society that is dominated by technical resources? â ¢ Does global exchange of information enable ubiquitous access to knowledge? â ¢ By which means do information technologies contribute to the solution or intensify global and local problems? â ¢ Which requirements arise from this problem for an IT-based society? I shall try to answer these questions from the point of view of a Third Worlder. Most other speakers at this colloquium are thinkers and experts known for their scholarship and academic achievements. I do not belong to the same league. I am not saying this out of humility; I am making a statement of fact. Then why am I here? Because I have felt the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on the developing world and I have been working for many years to overcome the 1 deleterious consequences of ICTs in the context of the poor and the marginalized. I wish to share with you what I have learnt through working in the field. I am coming from India where we had a major election a few months ago. We are happy about the election for two reasons. One, contrary to what is happening in many parts of the developing world, democracy in India is vibrant and we have been holding free and fair elections consistently for more than 50 years. Two, despite outstanding achievements in the areas of high technology in general and information and communication technologies (ICTs) in particular, the ruling governments in the states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh belonging to two different parties have failed to return to power, largely because the rural poor voted against them. Thanks to rapid developments in indigenous capabilities combined with favorable policies by the governments in these two southern states of India, a number of IT industries and research laboratories â both Indian and multinational â sprung up, mainly in the capital cities Bangalore (referred to as the Silicon Valley of the East) and Hyderabad (half jocularly called Cyberabad). But these developments did not have a perceptible impact on the rural poor, who felt that they were neglected. What can information and communication technologies (ICTs) do to help the poor? Can they do anything at all? That is a question that dominates the development discourse. If poverty has been so persistent that we could not eliminate it with all our efforts till now, how can the use of ICTs make a difference? Poverty is much more than absence of money. Often generations in poverty lead people to a sense of utter hopelessness and deprive them of their sense of self-respect and dignity. They are deprived of access to essential assets and opportunities such as education, healthcare, employment, land and other natural resources, services, infrastructure and credit. They have little say in their polity and society. They are not empowered to participate in making the decisions that shape their lives. They become increasingly marginalized, excluded and vulnerable to exploitation. This exploitation manifests in several forms such as bonded labour, child labour, inadequate compensation for work if and when they get work, ill treatment and deprivation of basic rights. It will be naïve to believe that we can solve the problem of poverty by providing access to computers and telecommunication to the poor of the world.1 We have always lived in an unequal world, but now the gap between information â havesâ and â have-notsâ is widening fast. As Kofi Annan2 has noted, â there is a real danger that the worldâ s poor will be excluded from the emerging knowledge-based 2 global economy.â Virtually every new technology tends to exacerbate the inequalities that separate the rich from the poor. The last few years have seen many initiatives that deploy ICTs in rural communities in many developing countries. Many world leaders have spoken in glorious terms about the tremendous potential of these new technologies in transforming the lives of the poor. â Technology doesnâ t come after you deal with poverty, but is a tool you use to alleviate poverty,â says James D Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank. Says Mark Malloch Brown, Head of UNDP, â ICTs can help us reach the Millennium Development Goals including the goal of halving poverty by 2015.â It is mastery over technology that enabled the early adopters of industrial revolution technologies to colonize and exploit the rest of the world. If the developing countries fail to take advantage of the new ICTs, the consequences could be far more serious. If we want technology to work for the poor we must make special efforts. In this talk I will describe from my own personal experience two widely different programmes where we are attempting to bridge the gulf that divides the rich from the poor through innovative use of information and communication technologies. In the first part of my talk we will look at how we at the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) are trying to harness ICTs as part of a holistic strategy for alleviating poverty in rural India. I will show why the emphasis should be on people and the public commons approach rather than on technology. In the second part, we will look at how the advent of new technologies has opened up the possibility for making knowledge distribution in science and scholarship a level-playing field. Here again the public commons approach is the key to success.

Presents a discussion of how "information" should be understood and defined in Information Science.

When two selection environments operate upon each other, mutual shaping in a co-evolution along a particular trajectory is one possible outcome. When three selection environments are involved, more complex dynamics can be expected as a result of interactions involving bi-lateral and tri-lateral relations. Three selection environments are specified in the Triple Helix model: (1) wealth generation (industry), (2) novelty production (academia), and (3) public control (government). Furthermore, this model somewhat reduces the complexity by using university-industry-government relations for the specification of the historical conditions of the non-linear dynamics. Whereas the historical analysis informs us about how institutions and institutional arrangements carry certain functions, the evolutionary analysis focuses on the functions of selection environments in terms of outputs. One can no longer expect a one-to-one correspondence between institutions and functions; a statistics is needed for the evaluation of how, for how long, and to what extent institutional arrangements enhance synergies among different selection environments. The empirical contributions to this Triple Helix issue point in the direction of â rich ecologiesâ : the construction of careful balances between differentiation and integration among the three functions.

Information literacy (IL) has become a vital competency in the current knowledge society. For students, the key to becoming independent learners and future knowledge workers lies in being information literate. However, existing information literacy education approaches have not been very successful in equipping students with these crucial skills to ensure deep erudition and long-lasting retention. Hence, pedagogy becomes critical in information literacy education. This research hypothesises that (i) informa-tion literacy skills have a positive impact on the quality of studentsâ project work; (ii) students grasp in-formation literacy skills more effectively when their innate interests, such as that determined by their re-spective dominant intelligences, are stimulated and applied to their work; and (iii) students internalise what they learn when they are coached over an extended period of time, on how to apply their newly ac-quired information literacy skills, and thus exhibit greater retention of such knowledge and competen-cies. Consequently they would produce work of better quality. To verify these postulations, an informa-tion literacy course was designed for students undertaking project work to equip them with the necessary information literacy skills, by using two established pedagogical approaches â Gardnerâ s Theory of Mul-tiple Intelligences and Feuersteinâ s Mediated Learning Experience. Subsequently the quality of the pro-ject work between the experimental and control groups were compared. This on-going research seeks to identify a utilitarian and viable pedagogical methodology that makes the teaching and learning of infor-mation literacy skills more effective and long-lasting respectively.

ICTs can reduce communication costs and break down geographical borders. In the developed nations government policies are being established which attempt to ensure that all citizens will get the opportunity to access the effective use of ICTs in order to enable them to participate in the educational, social and economic activities and democratic processes. Developed countries are getting much benefit from the advancement of ICTs. There is digital divide between developed and developing countries. The term digital divide has been applied to the gap that exists in most countries between those with ready access to the tools of ICTs, and those without such access or skills. In other words, it is the gap between the haveâ s and the have notâ s. The digital divide around the world is usually measured through statistical indices such as the number of telephone lines, personal computers, websites and Internet users and their ratio to the total population. This paper reviews the papers on issues related to digital divide that are affecting so many citizen in developing countries especially in Bangladesh and the factors that alienate people from enjoying the benefits of ICTs. The author recommends possible strategies that can be implemented in developing countries to reverse the widening gap of digital divide.

This paper attempts to draw a quick sketch of some of the research that relates to the state of social tagging research today. The result is intended to be representative rather than exhaustive. The goal of indexing consistency is discussed and examined with respect to the specificities of differing indexing systems. The relation of indexing consistency with 'language-in-use' is discussed. We then proceed to take a look at a few examples of much older systems that relate closely with the lessons now being learned in social tagging today, in order to situate the present activity in its historical context â and examine a few approaches used for text-based search-and-retrieval and their relevance to tag corpora. To conclude, some distinctions between personal, social and global information management are discussed.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / In this article, we report research on an algorithmic approach to alleviating search uncertainty in a large information space. Grounded on object filtering, automatic indexing, and co-occurrence analysis, we performed a large-scale experiment using a parallel supercomputer (SGI Power Challenge) to analyze 400,000/ abstracts in an INSPEC computer engineering collection. Two system-generated thesauri, one based on a combined object filtering and automatic indexing method, and the other based on automatic indexing only, were compared with the human-generated INSPEC subject thesaurus. Our user evaluation revealed that the system-generated thesauri were better than the INSPEC thesaurus in concept recall, but in concept precision the 3 thesauri were comparable. Our analysis also revealed that the terms suggested by the 3 thesauri were complementary and could be used to significantly increase â â varietyâ â in search terms and thereby reduce search uncertainty.