Data Literacy vs. Information Literacy

As librarians we are very familiar with the concept of information literacy, it’s rather long in the tooth, and yet there isn’t a single pat answer these days as to what it is. Case in point, does information literacy include data literacy, another concept that has been around for quite a while? The one glaring difference between these concepts is that librarians and educators talk about information literacy and business leaders and IT professionals talk about data literacy.

The 1989 ALA Presidential Committee on Information Literacy: Final Report states, “Information literacy is a survival skill in the Information Age.” The ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education from 2000 defined information literacy using a quotation from that same earlier Final Report: “Information literacy is a set of abilities requiring individuals to ‘recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information.’”

The charge of the Task Force that produced the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education adopted in 2016 recommended expanding the definition to include digital literacy because librarians see data, information, and knowledge as interrelated.

“In other professions, the words ‘knowledge,’ ‘data’ and ‘information’ are used interchangeably. However, in library science they are three related but distinct things,” wrote Reed Hepler and David Horalek in Introduction to Library and Information Science (College of Southern Idaho, 2023). And that’s true, and not just for library science. The Internet of Water Coalition very succinctly maps this out in “What are Data, Information, and Knowledge.”

In the late 1950s Peter Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker” to describe the primary post-modern employee. And a lot has happened since, The Information Superhighway and Big Data to name just a few. So, if we as librarians are supposed to be educators of information literacy that would mean we should at least be aware of what data literacy is.

A good way to get started is to find out how data literate you are. The Data Literacy Project has a simple online quiz “How Data Literate Are You?” which will plot you somewhere between Data Avoider to Data Guru. Then explore their courses to Learn the Language of Data. “A Culture of Data Literacy,” “Understanding Data,” and “Introduction to Data-Informed Decision Making” are all free.