Information preservation, a neglected component of information literacy

The issue of information literacy (IL) in contexts where people do not have easy access to libraries and to sources of information has not received much attention in IL research. In particular, rural areas in developing countries where there are no public libraries and travelling to town to access information is arduous and time-consuming need a different approach to IL than what is recommended for societies served by public libraries. This article reports on the findings from 52 semi-structured interviews conducted in January 2023 with villagers in two remote and marginalised areas of Bangladesh where an Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) project had been conducted in 2016-2019. The findings presented in this paper are based on a thematic analysis of the interview transcripts with a particular focus on the interrelationships between IL and information preservation. The interviews revealed an improvement in IL among the participants in the ICT4D project, as well as among those who had not participated in the project, but had benefited from it indirectly, particularly in relation to preserving information that is useful to them. The authors argue that an important component of IL programmes in marginalised rural communities should be information preservation literacy, that is an awareness of and the skills to keep information that can be useful later on.