Celebrating 40 years of Information Literacy!

1974 was a momentous year in many ways:

  • The Tour de France visited the UK for the first time. However, things did not go smoothly.
  • The World Cup was held in West Germany, who won the title.
  • Eurovision was held in Brighton and ABBA won with Waterloo.
  • President Nixon resigned following the Watergate scandal.
  • Paul Zurkowski coined the term “information literacy”.

As Alison J. Head highlighted in her LILAC 2014 keynote, many articles and books are still being written about information literacy 40 years later. There are several international conferences on information literacy, the most recent being the European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL), which debuted with much success in 2013.

To celebrate 40 years of infomation literacy, the CILIP Information Literacy Group has had a logo designed (image above), which features on our promotional sticky notes and highlighters.

For Vol. 7 No. 2 of the Journal of Information Literacy (JIL), Editor Jane Secker wrote an editorial entitled “Towards universal information literacy 40 years on”. The issue also included snippets from a series of interviews with Paul Zurkowski himself, conducted by Jeffrey V. Kelly during ECIL.

At LILAC 2014, delegates watched a video from Paul Zurkowski, and this is now available for everyone to view on YouTube.

Here’s to the next 40 years!

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