Intellectual participation in an information age: Issues, values, and strategies (original) (raw)

1998, The Journal of Academic Librarianship

he promise of the information superhighway as a vehicle to facilitate information transfer, worldwide communication, and economic and social development through the exchange of data, information, and ideas across national, social, political, and economic boundaries offers endless possibilities and boundless chaos. Its extraordinary potential and unknown consequences create exceptional opportunities and challenges for the library profession. There is general agreement that the issues about the information superhighway are broader than physical connectivity. As one looks at this very dynamic, complex resource, librarians must also consider social pluralism, information-seeking behavior of users, content, context, stakeholders, societal expectations, and most of all, from a professional perspective, the information needs of users. Within the contextual framework of a global village and an ever-changing, dynamic information landscape, the present challenge of the information superhighway for librarians is to teach skills, to develop competencies, and to promote ways and means of facilitating optimal intellectual participation by a wide range of users with different backgrounds, knowledge, skills, abilities, and attitudes. While librarians realize that the information age encompasses much more than the information superhighway, more than one commentator has suggested that the Internet and the World Wide Web are the major components of the information superhighway. Along its many access points is a plethora of roadside attractions and distractions containing electronic libraries, facts, figures, true and false data and