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Unit 12: Academic Library

strategy include: building services around citizens’ choices, making government and its services Notes
more accessible, ensuring social inclusion and ensuring two-way communication between the
government and the governed. Governments have always depended on libraries to collect and
disseminate government information, but e government adds very new and valued dimensions:
the citizen empowering potential reinforced by virtual access and the possibility to hold governments
accountable without physical confrontation.

12. Bridge Digital Divide along with the Economic Gap

Studies show that, only people and businesses in the higher income brackets are able to afford
the hardware, software and connectivity costs required to participate in the information revolution,
including e-commerce. The need for access to the Internet is however not limited to people
and businesses with discretionary income, and it is here that libraries are well positioned to
help bridge the economic gap along with the digital divide. From individuals who might not
be able to afford computer technology at home to many small and home-based businesses, the
library can provide the necessary connections to help prevent the division of our society into
information “haves and have-nots.” The western-style universal access is not a practical
reality in African countries where much of the population cannot afford individual access.
Instead, focus should be on providing access through community facilities like libraries and
schools. In this role, libraries can help in poverty alleviation since information poverty often
is the basis of economic poverty. In the information age, access to information has a place
alongside adequate food, health care, education, and other basic needs.
This phenomenon has broadened the definition of poverty to include information poverty.
More so, when it has become clear those people and nations who cannot or will not participate
fully in the new information economy will find it all the more difficult to climb out of poverty.
Just as today, books are a chance for ordinary people to better themselves, in the information
society, access to cyberspace will be a route to better prospects. But just as books are freely
available from libraries, the door of libraries should lead everyone to cyberspace toll-free. In
the information society this real chance for equality of opportunity through libraries should
remain.

13. Libraries and the Information Society

Despite the popular misconception, libraries have never confined themselves to books. Indeed,
libraries pre-dated the invention of the book, collecting papyrus scrolls (the original Alexandria
Library was a good example) and manuscripts (the mediaeval monastery libraries, for instance).
For libraries therefore, content is much more important than the medium. In fact, the information
revolution is aiding the library movement by reinforcing the material-virtual duality of knowledge
and information and helping in transforming our society into an information society based on
a strong foundation of knowledge which is universal, objective, timely and drawing from a
variety of sources. In developed countries, libraries are taking the lead in Internetization,
digitalization and virtualization of access to knowledge. Special online services are being
developed to support lifelong learning, provide health advice and information, and give citizens
access to official documents free of copyright restrictions.

Thus libraries are becoming not only Internet access points, but also places where people may
receive help in using the Internet and other information sources. Governments implementing
digital opportunity programmes do them in cooperation with libraries. For example, in implementing
its policy to ensure universal access to the Internet, the UK Government located two thirds of
the 6,000 ICT learning centers billed to open in 2002 in public libraries (CILIP, 2002). Libraries
are helping to build viable global communities based on local-global networks that enable

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