Towards A European Information Driving Licence: The Enil Project

Taken literally, the concept of "Information Society" means considering information as the fulcrum of everyday activities and implies attention to a number of factors, including: the volume of information available today; the variety of information content, information formats and vehicles of distribution; the prevalence of information-intensive activities, strictly based on lifelong learning attitudes; the massive fruition of information, i.e. information as a mass phenomenon.The combined effect of these factors results in a diffuse disorientation with respect to the current formidable supply of information. Therefore, a minimum set of competencies is widely required in order to improve the ability to dominate the multiform (print, electronic, local, online, networked, multimedia) universe of information available. Mastering this set of competencies is what is here assumed to be the purpose of information literacy (hereafter IL).Further, there is a great gap between USA-Australian and European approaches to IL. In fact, while in the USA and Australia IL is a national policy issue, in Europe it has been developed only in the form of episodic and fragmented initiatives.In view of the above, the EnIL (European network on Information Literacy) project started in 2001 by initiative of the Institute for Studies on Scientific Research and Documentation of the Italian National Research Council with the following aims: Establish a network of excellence made up by European IL experts (the EnIL network); Produce a report on the state of the art of IL in each of the EU-15 Member States; Agree among the EnIL members a common research agenda and the condition under which share methodologies, tools and results gained by the single Countries; Evaluate the feasibility of a European Information Driving Licence (EiDL), analogously to the European Computer Driving License; Start a pilot project of EiDL in Italy.