Information Literacy Policies in Europe: A framework for Analysis

The paper articulates the Information Literacy (IL) discourse in terms of three different perspectives of analysis: disciplinary, educational and cognitive. The cognitive perspective is the most discussed in the specialised literature and a number of standards for the definition and assessment of IL skills have been largely applied as well. The paper concentrates on a less explored dimension of Information Literacy: the policy dimension, linked to both the disciplinary and educational perspectives of analysis. More specifically, the paper considers IL as an issue crossing the spheres of influence of both Education and Information policies. Policy decision-making strongly relies on indicators that have been suitably defined to provide a measurable picture of the phenomenon in hand. To date, the analysis of IL policies in Europe is not so equipped and the task of comparing IL policies in the different European countries cannot be other than qualitative. Starting from the data available from the European Observatory on IL Policies and Research, the paper provides a common reference frame for analysing and comparing IL policies and research in European countries. The proposed framework complies with the design criteria of the European Observatory on IL Policies and Research that the author launched in 2006 (http://www.ceris.cnr.it/Basili/EnIL/gateway/gatewayhome.htm).