The concept of Information Literacy, at least as it has become more widely known beyond the library world, is not more than about 45 or 50 years old. Paul Zurkowski, then President of the Information Industry Association, a trade organization in the USA, is generally credited with coining the term and elaborating the concept beyond its traditional librarianship meaning, which was used at the time in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s In this period, it was identified a need for a new concept that placed a premium on learning how to crystallize and articulate information needed to solve a problem or make a decision, in easily searchable and retrievable ways, then learn how to search for and retrieve the
needed information efficiently, organize and arrange it in appropriate and convenient formats to suit the intended users, communicate it quickly and easily to others, use it for the intended purposes for which it was collected (and perhaps, serendipitously for other purposes) and then index and archive it for possible later use or dispose of it if no longer needed or any use for it contemplated.
