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For many years, one conventional term used often was “User
Education,” and it is still often used as the umbrella term
embracing Information Literacy.
In the 1980s, the computer revolution began to take hold and
information itself was beginning to be thought of as a resource in
organizational contexts, not just in the context of individual
persons. At that same time, as distinguished commentators like
Daniel Bell began to write about the transition from an Agrarian
Society to an Industrial Society and then to an Information Society
and Knowledge Societies, there seemed to be no existing term or
concept that fully met the emerging need for educating and
training people in the value of knowing how to search for and
retrieve good and relevant information, and avoid the dysfunctions
of having to handle too much unneeded and irrelevant
information. Management experts admonished the new
“information managers” to follow the tried and tested practices of
planning, budgeting, inventorying, auditing and controlling, but
applied to information resources as opposed to more conventional
resources like manpower, money and materials.
At that time the idea of thinking of information as an
organizational resource that could be planned, managed and
controlled was virtually heretical. People said: “you can’t manage
data and information any more than you can put a genie back in a
bottle. Information is too amorphous, too vague, too shapeless
and formless, too unstructured. It’s not like human beings, money,
facilities, supplies and equipment, land, crops or trees, with a
concrete shape and tangible form which you can, with varying
degrees of success and using various specialized methods and
techniques, touch, smell and feel, as well as see and hear.” And so,
in part because of these caveats and misgivings, information
literacy was very slow to catch on with the general public.
But the computer and telecommunications revolutions were
unstoppable, and with them came an explosion of data,
information and knowledge like a virtual tsunami. The tsunami was
Overview of Information Literacy Resources Worldwide |21