A Taxonomy of Digital Literacy

Epistemic Status: All models are wrong, some are useful. This seems potentially useful to me.

I was teaching a class on the Digital Divide recently and a student suggested that many of the challenges we were discussing actually existed at very different stages. (Apologies for forgetting which student, I would be happy to replace this aside with a citation). From this observation we as a class took a few minutes to construct a simple taxonomy of the levels of abstraction of digital literacy. This is only a first draft, so more work is needed.

A brief search only revealed the mapping of digital literacy onto Bloom’s taxonomy. I think this effort is a bit different.

Level of Abstraction	Digital Literacy	Classic Literacy	Numeracy
5: Social Implications	Algorithmic mass influence, deep fakes, privacy and anonymity, AI	Shared cultural references and understanding	Effects of societal understanding of probability and statistics
4: Goal-oriented Operation	Cooperative (social media, multiplayer, etiquette), programming	Narrative comprehension	Algorithms, probability, statistics
3: Advanced Operation	Digital creation (write a document/email)	Sentence construction	Equations (a2 + b2 = c2)
2: Regular Operation	Use of programs or apps (play a game/music/video)	Word recognition	Operations (BEDMAS)
1: Basic Operation	Use of operating system (turn on/off, point, click, drag)	Character recognition (ABCs)	Character recognition (123s)
0: Access	Access to digital tools (computers, phones)	Access to literature (books)	Access to math texts

An over-simplified taxonomy of a selection of literacies

Each level of abstraction relies on the lower stages. When designing digital literacy programming, having a clear idea of which level of abstraction is being targeted. Beyond the various levels, there are likely different streams content could be organized into.

NB. This may be the first time I have written something directly applicable to librarianship.

Endurance and Change

Watching an old career guide film, The Librarian 1947 Vocational Guidance Films, I was struck by the contrast between how librarianship was presented in 1947 and the state of the profession today. I found it particularly interesting how the field has both changed and possessed some enduring constants between then and now. The places I found this manifest most strongly was in terms of the values and practices being displayed in the film compared to the current state of the field.

Enduring Values

In terms of values that have remained constant the film highlights the librarian’s responsibilities to the community and to patron service. What this value means may have evolved but the fact that it is a value seems to have been the case for a very long time. The film notes special librarian functions such as community outreach and adult learning programs which mirror ideas that have been presented to me as being distinctly modern.

Changing Values

In contrast, the film also has notable examples of changes in values. The film’s description and depiction of the leadership of a libraries implies a great many assumptions. The library manager is presented as a man in a suit and tie that has been train as a manager, not necessarily as a librarian. This manager’s central role in decision making and as the commanding force in the library suggestive of a classical school of management theory. By comparison, modern libraries often have a focus on collaborations and partnerships with all staff being viewed as being able to offer useful input. Furthermore, I believe that it is no longer the default assumption that a library manager will be male. These changes are reflected in the ALA’s Code of Ethics. In the 1939 revision there was an entire section on proper governance of a library and the current version does not attempt to impose such a top-down, one size fits all structure.

Enduring Practices

The film list a variety of roles for librarians including cataloguers, reference, circulation, school librarians, children’s librarians and special librarians, such as in hospitals. All these positions continue to exist in some form into the present day. The persistence of these roles is evidence that the services they provide is still of value to patrons.

Changing Practices

The changes in practices are perhaps the most obvious. Gone are the card catalogues of yore, replaced with digital search tools and home access of electronic documents. The attempted rebranding of librarians as ‘information professionals’ reflects these developments. Some of the services now being offered in many libraries have no antecedent. Where now we have manker spaces and 3d printers, libraries of the past did not have lathes and other machine tools. However, even these changes are in line with the library’s history of being privileged knowledge into the public space.

Conclusion

In conclusion it seems that librarianship has not experienced a revolutionary break from the past. For all the professions previous shortcomings it also possesses a rich tradition of service that we can be proud of as we find our place in the future.

Digital Libraries

Brewster Kahle in a TED talk called A Free Digital Library discusses his creation of the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine. His stated goal is “Universal access to all knowledge,” but his efforts are also very interesting from the perspective of librarianship.

His efforts to build a repository that could house “every book ever published, every movie ever released, all the strata of web history” stretches the limits of what we might consider to be a memory institution. Like other memory institutions, libraries, museums and archives, the Internet Archive strives to be free to the public and in service to the public good.

It is amazing to me that this massive effort that draws upon information from the entire world is being run by a single non-profit organization. It makes me wonder if internet archives should be more consciously placed amongst the pantheon of memory institutions. This might encourage the creation of more local publically accessible internet archives, which may be able to catch items that a single global project might miss.