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Author
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Ola Pilerot and Jenny Lindberg
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Year
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2011
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Publisher
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Library Trends, 60(2), 338-360.
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Abstract
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Organizations such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) put a lot of effort in advocacy and policy making for information literacy (IL). Their ambition to foster IL can be seen as a part of a multinational educational project. By exporting a Western IL model focused on textual information sources and the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) into non-Western contexts that to a great extent lack ICTs, the educational project for IL runs the risk of turning into an imperialistic project. A discursively oriented analysis of two prominent policy documents discussed in the light of the so-called new imperialism and the idea of invisible technologies—indicates a standardized onesize-fits-all-model of IL. Through establishing a close contact between the policy-making strand and the research strand in the IL literature and by adhering to the broad concept of information literacies, the risk of imperialism and oppression might lessen.