Informed Citizens in the Global Information Commons: A Global Perspective

While citizens in a global information society have access to a wider and more diverse range of political information than ever before, the very technologies that enable this access also tend to bypass the kind of environments, like libraries, where citizens can learn to make productive use of that information. However, rather than marking the irrelevance of the library for citizenship, the author argues that political literacy in the network society may actually depend upon bringing the sophisticated reference structure of the library to the network. The author concludes with a model for distributed, cooperatively managed reference services using domain ontologies.