The ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education offers library and information science (LIS) professionals a conceptual approach for leading information literacy efforts in a digital environment. But while a good start, Nathan Filbert suggests that it is not enough to validate librarianship's transdisciplinary potential. In this column, Filbert addresses the programmatic and directional efforts necessary for LIS to realize expansive expertise in information resource management, reference, and user services in the evolving, complex, information ecosystem. Drawing on the profession's past and present, he suggests a vision and a philosophy for mediating the infosphere of the future.-Editor L ibrarianship is inherently a transdisciplinary vocation.1 Functioning as a nexus of information resources and literacy instruction for diverse communities, disciplines, businesses, and patrons, librarians must possess the know-how of utilizing manifold technologies, vocabularies and discourses, media, and styles to help participants discover, discern, and deploy the best resources for a given need.Librarianship tends to focus on principles and practices in the fulfilment of its vocation. Problem-and project-based inquiry and resolution processes feature prominently in library-related work and, coupled with objectives of providing access to global information resources, result in an institution and profession expert in adaptation, assimilation, and reconstruction. These admirable objectives have clearly served the profession well, surviving since the beginning of recorded knowledge.Technological developments across the past century, particularly in relation to communication and information processes, are comprehensively reshaping human reality. All aspects of lived experience-environment, relationships, activities, and knowledge-are metamorphosing and evolving symbiotically as digital/analog fusion is being composed. Paradigms shift accordingly. No field of human inquiry is not grappling with these changes and their rapidity. Our disciplines and discourses, politics, and economies all recognize the necessity of emerging from discrete areas of expertise toward multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and, ultimately, transdisciplinary understandings as implied by our networks and connectivities. "'Cyberculture,' 'posthumanism,' 'singularity,' and other similarly fashionable ideas can all be understood as attempts to make sense of our new hyperhistorical predicament . . . but the hole is way deeper, the problem much more profound. We need to do some serious philosophical digging."
Transitional justice developed as a pragmatic concept prescribing a set of mechanisms to be used by societies or countries experiencing systematic periods of armed conflicts or emerging from authoritarian regimes characterised by egregious violations of human rights or humanitarian law. While relative success stories of its utilisation have been recorded, questions have been raised regarding the recent tendency to prescribe transitional justice for societies which have not or are yet to undergo any transition. Through its lack of success in Nigeria and debatable effectiveness in Uganda, the article shows that transitional justice mechanisms are not a cure-all. While it does not contend that there is a perfect notion of transitional justice, the article proposes that transitional justice mechanisms must be designed from the ground up, with the victims at the centre of the process. While transitional justice is a global project, this article argues that its success can be achieved when its applicability and administration take into account the contextual and indigenous focus with a move towards localising its mechanisms.
The concept of "digital literacy" has been much discussed and variously misunderstood in our society. Owing to digital communication technologies, it is often confused with other literacies and skills necessary for utilizing and evaluating digital information. As information and communication is increasingly produced, accessed, and controlled in digital formats there is significant need to clarify among "information literacies" what "digital literacy" means and demands. In order to accomplish this the author reviews what is meant by literacies in human society; examines the nature of the digital as a language; describes genuine digital literacy; and elucidates the sociopolitical importance of the growing digital illiteracy in global citizenry and how this might be addressed.
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