Zurkowski

Today I finally got hold of Zurkowski’s paper “The Information Services Environment: Relationship and Priorities”. To the uninitiated, this paper written by Paul Zurkowski in 1974, is cited my many information literacy scholars as the first mention of citizens being “information literate”. Zurkowski wrote the paper as President of the Information Industry Association (I.I.A), a trade association established in 1968 and comprising of 70 member companies in 1974; involved in the creation and distribution of information products, submitting it to the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science.

Right from the go – Zurkowski heads his prologue “The Goal: Achieving Information Literacy”; he then goes on to state we experience an overabundance of information whenever available information exceeds our capacity to evaluate it. He claims that this is a universal condition and lists three reasons: 1) That information seeking differs according to time and purpose; 2) There is a multiplicity of sources and access routs resulting in a kaleidoscopic approach taken by people; 3) more human experience is being dealt with in information equivalents. Talking about the then commercial shape of publishing, Zurkowski uses the analogy of an information “prism” gathering “light” (ideas and concepts) and then performing a variety of “refracting” functions (editing, encoding, printing, microfilming, arranging etc) to produce a spectrum of products, services and systems to meet the kaleidoscopic needs of the user. People who are trained in the application of information resources to their work can be called information literate (p.6). It is important to remember that Zurkowski is talking about the access and dissemination of information in the workplace as an economic benefit and necessity, calling on the National Commission to commit to a major national education programme to achieve universal information literacy by 1984; presently he estimates that only one-sixth of the US population are information literate.

In many ways this was a very visionary move – be it one vested by commercial interests. I am struck however, how in such a short time the technology and information provision moves and the vision dates; by 1983 you could buy an IBM PC with a 10 MB hard-disk, thus changing and challenging in a business context forever what it meant to access information. This inability to predict technical change in even a relatively short time is one of the key criticisms made against information literacy, and one I hope to explore in a future posting.

Zurkowski, P. G. (1974). The Information Environment: Relationships and Priorities. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science. Washington DC.