Information Literacy and Life Long Learning

According to American Library Association (ALA) report, information literacy is a set of abilities requiring individuals to “recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information”. Information literacy also is increasingly important in the contemporary environment of rapid technological change and proliferating information resources. According to Henderson and Scheffler, individuals with information literacy are people who know the ways to reach information and use it appropriately by interpreting the information. The need for information and the increase in the quantity and variety of information made information literacy a necessity. Information literacy is the set of skills needed to discover, retrieve, analyze, and use information. The twenty-first century has been named the information era, due to the explosion of information and the information sources. Due to information explosion it has become increasingly clear that students cannot learn everything they need to know in their field of study, within a few years, at school. Information literacy competencies empower the people with the critical skills that will help them to become independent lifelong learners. These competencies will enable people to apply their knowledge from the familiar environment to the unfamiliar. Life long learning is as old as humankind, indeed curiosity and the capacity to learn are among the defining characteristics of what it means to be human. For many hundreds of generations, people learned only through their own experience, and to a lesser extent, through the observation of others. Gradually, however, as language became more complex and sophisticated, it was possible to codify what had been learned by previous generations, and in distant locations, and to pass on information about unseen phenomena. In most early cultures which relied on oral transmission of knowledge, people had highly evolved capacities for listening and for remembering; however, compared with most people living today in advanced western countries, the amount and complexity of information to be dealt with by an average human being was clearly bounded and relatively slowly changing. Information plays a vital role in all spheres of life in this technological era.