Information Literacy: An International State of the Art

H. Conclusions
I. References


III. Latin America

Information Literacy State of the Art Report

December, 2006

Jesús Lau

Chair, Information Literacy Section/IFLA

Universidad Veracruzana /USBI VER

Veracruz, México

[e-mail]

A. Introduction
Information literacy is still a scattered activity in the Latin American region. Some schools have IL programs, but they are few, most of them in the private educational sector. Most of the activity carried out in the region is at higher education institutions. The countries that have more solid activity are Argentina, Brazil, Chile and specially Mexico, although information literacy is seldom an official learning activity in the curricula. Some IL conferences and meetings have taken place in the last few years. However, IL topics are also included at general library science conferences. About a dozen books have been published in Latin America by now; and some serial articles are being published each year.
This report mainly covers Mexico, the country that reported more activity at the UNESCO/IFLA International Information Literacy Resources Directory up to now (http://www.uv.mx/usbi_ver/unesco/). The bias of the report towards Mexico has to do with the geographical location of the directory, as well as with the main, if not unique, Latin America library literature database located at UNAM, in Mexico City, that records the library publishing production of the region. The comments and generalizations to other Spanish-speaking countries and Brazil are personal experiences and assumptions-based on country visits of the author to some of the included countries.

1. 
   Basic concepts of information literacy
   

There is not a unified term to denote information literacy in the Spanish-speaking world. The Spaniards have favored the phrase “Alfabetización informacional” in their recent meetings, a phrase that in Mexico is translated as “Alfabetización informativa”. However, the term that has been coined in Mexico and used in some countries of Latin America, is “Desarrollo de habilidades informativas (DHI)”, a term that also emphasizes the process rather than the result of user information training. Another way to denote this information learning activity is simply using “Information Competencies”. Some library professionals also use “User Education” and “User Instruction”. There is a general reluctance to use information literacy as such, because it denotes “rather basic skills”. Information literacy means, for most people, the challenge of not being able to read and write the challenge of being illiterate. Users who are graduates, professors and education administrators reject to attend workshops where they will be “alphabetized”.

2. 
   IL for daily life: citizens, workers, business
   

The development of Information competencies is still confined to the education sector, mainly at higher education institutions. There seems to be no activity yet in public libraries, or the private sector. Information training may occur in companies under other general subject training, such as when doing marketing training or when the staff requires to do research; but no official information literacy has been reported in the literature. Some efforts have been identified, though, such as the different resources (SMU, 2006) on information access that the Uruguayan Medical Union has made available to its members.