Report from IFLA: The Information Literacy Section meeting

In this post I will describe some key items that came out of the IFLA Information Literacy Section committee meetings that took place during the IFLA conference held in Gothenburg, Sweden, 11-15 August (the poor pictures were takenat the section committee dinner). IFLA (International Federation for Library Associations and Institutions) has a very small headquarters in the Hague, Netherlands, and most of its work is done by its members. IFLA has many sections and divisions, representing different regions of the world and different subject areas. One of the sections is Information Literacy and I am a member of its Standing Committee. As with all IFLA comittees, it is truly international, with members from Africa, Australia, Asia, North America, South America and Europe (though there is a bit of a bias towards Europe).
The IFLA Information Literacy Section website is at http://www.ifla.org/en/information-literacy
At the Section Committee, apart from talking about events we were organising, the following topics were discussed:
1. International Information Literacy logo. The website where you can download this is at http://www.infolitglobal.info/logo/en/ We decided that we are going to make an effort to make this available in more languages (currently it is there in French, Spanish, Russian, English), so people have been asked to say what the right phrase is in their language and we will arrange the graphic design
2. The Marketing manual for the logo was published earlier in the year at http://www.infolitglobal.info/logo/en/manual and is a useful online guide for marketing more generally
3. “State of the art” of IL in different countries. Reports on some countries were drawn up a few years ago and are available at http://www.infolitglobal.info/en/ There are also some updates at http://www.ifla.org/en/publications/81 (scroll down to see them) There was a proposal to turn these into an open wiki so that they were easier to keep up to date. The wiki will also cover definitions of IL. A small party are responsible for this, so look out for announcements later in the year.
4. There is an initiative to get Information literacy put more officially on the agenda of UNESCO (United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural Organization) and thus on the agenda of governments worldwide. The UNESCO Information For All Programme (IFAP) has put together a paper in consultation with the IFLA Section, recommending that international recommendations on information literacy be drawn up and that they create indicators so that progress on IL could be reported internationally. A working party has been formed to follow this through and I am now is one of the members. UNESCO already has funded some projects in IL (e.g. “Training the Trainers” but this is stepping things up a notch.

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