Abstract:The study is based on a survey conducted in rural areas of Sri Lanka on information needs and the citizens' ability to grasp the same. The study attempts to identify components of IL concept and tries to buildup an Information Literacy Model relating to rural communities. It was able to derive through the survey, factors that affect the level of IL. It was found that, competency level of IL not only depends upon language literacy or on conventional education system, but on other social factors as well. The research establishes the fact that Information Literacy is a 'living concept', as phases of IL and factors that affect to its behaviour changes person to person and environment to environment.

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The rural population in Sri Lanka consists of about 78.5% of the total population. Even though they contribute to a considerable portion of the GDP, most of them live in disadvantaged socio-economic conditions. The rural communities are equally enthusiastic in obtaining information for their daily lives, as are urbanites in facing challenges of the modern world. In planning development projects, the 'information' component is often overlooked. A SWOT analysis was done in the information environment to assess the feasibility of launching this kind of project. Information need categories were also identified by a mini-survey conducted in a rural area. This paper discusses a strategy to fulfill information needs by building up community information pages and using existing administrative structure. It is also important to upload the information generated at the local level. Two strategies are presented in collecting local information. The information upload strategy discussed in this paper is established on district and provincial administrative levels. Lower levels of administration are used to collect locally generated and specialized information.

The paper covers a review of evidence existing for documentation systems followed in the pre Christian literary history and during the 19 th C. A special attention was given to the evidence of a most comprehensive cataloguing system followed in the Alexandrian library 'the pinakes' which had a great impact to cataloguing, indexing and documentation tradition thereafter. Even though the concept 'documentation' was not introduced at that time during the 1 st century to date, many attempts were made to capture the knowledge by scientists, priests, publishers and librarians especially after the printing technology was introduced in 16 th C. A special attention was paid to the most versatile and systematic documentation system designed and carried out in 19 th C by two visionaries, Paul Otlet and Henry la Fontaine who were creators of the concept 'documentation'. Evidence for this effort still exists in a card based archive in Belgium and its vision and design is now identified by computer scientists as the base structure of the World Wide Web and the base architecture of modern computer networks and search engines. The article provides a brief review of the structure and history of the bibliographic repertory of 18 million index cards.

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