IL in your local library looks less like the dryly defined practice of locating and utilising information
and more like the UNESCO (2005) style means of “empower[ing] people in all walks of life”. Public
libraries are the front line for the vast majority of the populace when it comes to satisfying their
information needs – even the ones they did not know they had. If UNESCO (2005) is correct in
asserting that, in the modern digital world, IL ”is a basic human right”, then public libraries are the
civil rights activists: facilitating social inclusion and redressing the injustices of the information
divide