MILA has published a report on how information literacy (IL) impacts on society. This free document, available through a Creative Commons licence, can be found by clicking below.
Information Literacy and Society report
There is also a set of slides summarising the report, as presented at LILAC in March 2024.
A year ago, MILA commissioned a project, funded by CILIP and the CILIP Information Literacy Group (ILG), to produce a comprehensive review of research about the impact of IL on society. That important piece of work has now concluded and we hope that it will make a valuable contribution to a better understanding of the relevance of IL in different settings. The review was undertaken by Dr Bruce Ryan, Marina Milosheva and Associate Professor Dr Peter Cruikshank at Edinburgh Napier University. MILA is very grateful to them, as well as to CILIP and ILG for having provided the financial support without which the project would not have been possible.
The review finds that the core research that investigates the role of IL in society is geographically skewed towards the anglosphere and the first world. Education, particularly tertiary education, is significantly over-represented in the IL research literature. Barriers to shaping information-literate populations are raised by issues around IL teaching and structures that could support it, including government (in)action.
Other key findings are:
- IL research covers a very wide range of topics and contexts, although a disproportionate amount of this research focuses on higher education environments.
- IL training/education should be delivered by collaboration between librarians and teachers/lecturers, continue throughout education, and be reinforced during careers and lifetimes.
- IL research may have indirect impact, e.g. research into improving medical professionals’ IL does not just affect these professionals but also wider society, i.e. their patients.
- There are missed opportunities for such societal impact, e.g. where medical professionals do not have IL skills and so may not give their patients the best treatment possible; if citizens do not have health information literacy, their health may suffer.
- The review validates many of the findings of the earlier Information Literacy Impact Framework (https://mila.coderra.uk/il-impact-framework/), published in September 2022.
Much IL research delivers snapshots of IL skills in various contexts and geographies. During the project, it was not possible to ascertain if such snapshots had been followed up by investigating subsequent changes and the reasons behind them. Hence an anticipated future project is to understand whether follow-up research has been undertaken, and any barriers to such research. There is a push towards understanding the role of theory in IL. It would be revealing to understand how the core IL research found in this review engages with theory.
