[Sigiii-l] Plaza Position Statement

[Nanci Oddone]

The globalization of the information society brings to us all – librarians, professors within LIS schools, consultants or any other kind of information workers – either in our professional or personal lives, a more sound need to be responsible. Now it’s not enough to continue exercising our everyday living or doing our current work locally, without noticing all that happens beyond our own places. It is impossible for us to ignore the connections between what we are doing here and what is being practiced out there, across the world. With the globalization of the information society comes an idea of diffusion and dissemination – or democratization and spreading of knowledge – which imposes itself to all people and claims to be achieved. So, there’s one central word related to this new scenery and to these new demands: access. Not necessarily free access. Only access. And although there are many ways of having access to what is being done and spoken in other regions of the world in each moment, the most important of them seems to be a new way of thinking. Because people and specially the information workers are changing their ways of thinking, it is now possible to read, immediately after its publication, Tom Wilson’s review of the Brazilian collection Inteligência organizacional e competitiva, organized by Dr. Kira Tarapanoff, one of our most remarkable professors and researchers. In addition, it is possible to talk to Michel Menou, in Portuguese, right from our personal mailboxs. Therefore, it is clear that these new conditions affect not only those “less-developed” countries and people. They influence well-established information workers all over the world too, because they became aware the problems we face are the same. From now on it will be not only possible but obligatory for us to speak more closely with each other, teaching and learning directly from our colleagues’ experiences. Perhaps then we can finally build a consistent and international information science community.



Nanci Oddone

Professor at Instituto de Ciência da Informação

Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brasil

(With a copy to Ancib-l)

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