Information Literacy Program for Book Publishers in Malaysia

INFORMATION LITERACY PROGRAM FOR BOOK PUBLISHER IN MALAYSIA

1. BACKGROUND

1.1 The role of books has changed significantly over past half century as medium of communication and one of information sources than ever before. Nowadays, books give the big impact to the society by influenced from the content of those books. In Malaysia for instance, according to the statistic even Malaysia only produced books around 10,000 per title a year compare to the other countries, it still become a huge amount. But is it all the books either in printed or electronic books provides valid content and can be trustworthy? In this phenomenon, publisher has to play the important role in term of selection the books to be published. Other than that it can bring to information explosion. According to Wikipedia, information explosion is a term that describes the rapidly increasing amount of published information and the effects of this abundance of data. As the amount of available data grows, the problem of managing the information becomes more difficult, which can lead to information overload. When this happened, it gives some difficulties to the information users to find the correct information because of validity behind the information. Today everyone can write a book and provide the information and as the mountain of information gets larger and larger, people begin to suffer from what Richard Saul Wurman calls "information anxiety". Information anxiety is that helpless feeling that comes with realization that there is more information than one person can ever hope to process. As with many other types of anxiety, having some knowledge and training about information and its uses can help reduce information anxiety. With this, publisher needs information literacy skills to identify the better information about a book to be published. In Malaysia, there are many publishers and almost of those publishers less focus about this problem.

1.2 Publisher can be define as who are produce and disseminate of literature or information and any activity of making information available for public view. In some cases, authors may be their own publisher that means originators and developers of content also provide media to deliver and display the content. In my opinion, publisher is important part where in produce information. When we refer to the information lifecycle, publisher play important role where information have to be manage. Manage here means information provided by author have to be manage or check by the publisher in order to published information quality. Information provided must include all the characteristic of information. It just can be identify with information literacy skills. The question that to be answer by publisher are how do users know when they found information that answers their information need is correct and valid. Information literacy skill