Page 16 - DLIS101_LIBRARY_AND_INFORMATION_SOCIETY

Unit 2: Socio-Economic Development and Role of Libraries

The network economy stresses that businesses will work collectively in webs or as part of business Notes
ecosystems rather than as stand-alone units. Social networking refers to the process of collaboration
on massive, global scales. The internet economy focuses on the nature of markets that are enabled
by the Internet. Knowledge services and knowledge value put content into an economic context.
Knowledge services integrate Knowledge management, within a Knowledge organization, that trades
in a Knowledge market.
Although seemingly synonymous, each term conveys more than nuances or slightly different views
of the same thing. Each term represents one attribute of the likely nature of economic activity in the
emerging post-industrial society. Alternatively, the new economic order will incorporate all of the
above plus other attributes that have not yet fully emerged.

Intellectual property considerations

One of the central paradoxes of the information society is that it makes information easily reproducible,
leading to a variety of freedom/control problems relating to intellectual property. Essentially, business
and capital, whose place becomes that of producing and selling information and knowledge, seems
to require control over this new resource so that it can effectively be managed and sold as the basis of
the information economy. However, such control can prove to be both technically and socially
problematic. Technically because copy protection is often easily circumvented and socially rejected
because the users and citizens of the information society can prove to be unwilling to accept such
absolute commodification of the facts and information that compose their environment.
Responses to this concern range from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the United States
which make copy protection circumvention illegal, to the free software, open source and copy left
movements, which seek to encourage and disseminate the “freedom” of various information
products. Caveat: Information society is often used by politicians meaning something like “we all
do internet now”; the sociological term information society has some deeper implications about
change of societal structure.
Illiteracy among Nigerians, with its social and economic implications, has become a growing concern
in recent times. And national awareness of problems associated with limited literacy skills has led
to legislation, beginning at the Federal level to fund programmes such as the Universal Basic
Education. Essentially, libraries are viewed as an important component of this massive educational
effort of the Federal Government without the library no meaningful academic efforts can be carried
out.
Generally, literacy is considered to be the ability to read, write, speak, and compute at a certain
level. Functional literacy involves skills needed to cope at an adult level in everyday situations,
such as reading a newspaper or a novel. The importance of the library in educational development
cannot be over-estimated. Akinpelu (1994) described books as, “the shrines where the saint is believed
to be, and having built an ark to save learning from the deluge, deserve in propriety any new
instrument or engine whereby learning should be advanced”.
In this paper therefore, efforts would be made to discuss the institutional roles of libraries in
advancing the frontiers of literacy and education development in the society. The paper would
examine the essentials and close bearing of the library upon the advancement of education and
learning in Nigeria.

Telegraph is the first successful technology that could send and receive information
faster than human being could move an object.

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