Mahmood & Shafique -Part 8
Civil Society Participation in Information Society and the Role of Libraries
Libraries are the representatives of social society and aim to serve the society. Libraries and information services contribute to the sound operation of the inclusive information society. They enable intellectual freedom by providing access to information, ideas and works of imagination in any medium and regardless of frontiers. They help to safeguard democratic values and universal civil rights impartially. The unique role of libraries and information services is to respond to the particular questions and needs of individuals. This complements the general transmission of knowledge by the media, for example, and makes libraries and information services vital to a democratic and open information society. Libraries are essential for a well-informed citizenry and transparent governance, as well as for the take-up of e-government. Keeping this reality in view, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) has stressed the active role of libraries in information society:
"They also build capacity by promoting information literacy and providing support and training for effective use of information resources, including Information and Communication Technologies. This is especially critical in promoting the development agenda because human resources are central to economic progress. In these ways libraries contribute significantly to addressing the digital divide and the information inequality that results from it. They help to make the Millennium Development Goals a reality, including reduction of poverty. They will do more with quite modest investments. The value of the return is at least 4-6 times the investment (IFLA, 2006)."
IFLA urges national, regional, and local governments, as well as international organizations, to invest in library and information services as vital elements of their information society strategies. By so doing, an informed and literate citizenry will not only be more stable, but more productive and thus able to participate more effectively in the democratic process and also be helpful members of their respective local communities (Horton, 2005).
In a bid to foster the role of libraries as key players in building people-centered, inclusive and development-oriented knowledge societies, UNESCO and IFLA have decided to establish a strategic alliance as part of their contribution to implement the decisions of the WSIS (UNESCO, 2006).
Keeping the tripartite model of WSIS in view, the Government of Pakistan is also trying to assure the participation of the civil society in the WSIS platform at local and international level. The objective is to create environments that support and nurture informed, aware citizens who contribute meaningfully to society through multimedia based content; delivery through multiple means such as radio, Internet, computers and CD-ROMs. Major stakeholders of this category are the government (relevant ministries), non-governmental and community-based organizations, private organizations such as content developers, and corporate social responsibility programs at multinational corporations and local companies.
The list of participants of meetings held to achieve the WSIS objectives reveals that no representative was chosen from a library. Libraries' traditional assets lie in their skills in organizing large masses of information and acting as channels to that information. At least half of the presentations made to the pre-Summit delegates involved, in one way or another, the notion of social inclusion. That is to say, governments need to work much harder to find ways to reach out to immigrants, the under-employed, the unemployed, and other "unstable" populations. Governments should begin to see libraries as a tool to help reduce social unrest by encouraging unstable groups to come into libraries and access the Internet and read books and periodicals, thus making libraries, especially public and school libraries, much more valuable to their governments and countries. The other aspect of social inclusion is more closely related to the traditional library role, but it is placed a little more directly in the context of the information society. It is that libraries and information services share the common vision of an "Information Society for All" (analogous to UNESCO's Information for All and Education for All programs), which might be viewed as a restatement of the "Haves versus Have-Nots." It has, however, the added objective of libraries helping all citizens to create, access, use, and share information and knowledge.