The Impact of Human Capital on Information Literate Behavior Among Librarians:A case study at University of Diponegoro

Abstract

Information literacy has become one of the key competency needed by any individual in the information age. Librarians as information professionals are required to play its part in developing this competency. For librarians themselves, this competency become a twofold obligation. First, they have to be information literate so that they can make the most use of information for their own need, for any purposes. Second, they have the obligation to teach this competency to library users, so that they can access, evaluate and use information critically and wisely. The competency itself can be gained through various ways (Bruce, 1997) : including information literacy education. However, in Indonesia, information literacy education for librarians has not been widely available. While information resources proliferate, librarians have not been formally armed with skills to critically harness new formats of information resources. Therefore their information literacy competency development rely more on the knowledge of information skills gained through life experiences. This phenomena can be analyzed by using the sociological perspective of human capital. Through the lens of human capital theory, information literacy is the accumulation of one’s knowledge through general education, training (either general or specific) and other life experiences related to information handling, such as technology use, access to sources of information, etc. These three factors will help individuals develop their information literacy. This paper try to examine the relationship between human capital development and information literate behavior among librarians.