Culturally Grounded Approaches to Information Literacy Understanding

This paper is based on a doctoral study, which aimed at illuminating a culturally situated understanding of Information Literacy (IL) contextualized by a particular landscape (geographic region) with related socio-cultural characteristics. The information literacy experiences and practices of Bulgarian academic librarians showed that their understanding of IL is highly influenced by the socio-cultural characteristics of the region. The five significant aspects revealed were: subject expertise rules, academic librarians often consider familiarity with information technologies as Information Literacy, a piece of information is significant and useful if it helps to solve a problem and/or to advance knowledge, Bulgarians do not like to ask for help, and that there is a lot of pressure to catch up with developments and best practices in the outside IL world. The assessed IL paradigm in the country facilitates further inquiry into suitable framework and practices. A new literacy paradigm, Info-cultural Literacy, emerged from the study.