1. Challenges and Opportunities
for Information Management in
Multi-literacy Environments
Presented by
Gayathri J. Gunawardena

2. Information
• Information is communicating or receiving
knowledge on some fact or circumstance
(Wikipedia, 2013).
– Information conveys a message
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3. Creation and
gathering
Disposition
Processing
Information Life
Cycle
Transmittal
Retention
Retrieval and
use
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4. Information Management (IM)
• Organization and control of various activities
associated in the information life cycle
(Wikipedia, 2013)
– Organizing, retrieving, acquiring, securing and
maintaining information
Pre 1970s
• Paper based
Post 1970s
• Digitized
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5. Importance of IM
• People need to
– Share knowledge and resources in the world to
solve problems and
– Make life more comfortable
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6. Multi-literacy environment
• Literacy means the capture and expression of
information
• Multi-literacy means many ways of achieving
this goal
– Multilingual / Multicultural
– Multimedia
– Multimodal
Multilingual / Multicultural content presented using multimedia and
accessible through multimodal delivery techniques
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7. Multilingual / Multicultural
• There are 6000+ languages in the world
• It is not possible to learn all of them
• Language barriers are natural in human
communication
• Lack of a single language for communication
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8. Multimedia
•
•
•
•
•
•
Text
Audio
Video
Graphics and animation
Interactivity content
Still images
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9. Multimodal
• Various human device interaction modes such
as vision, audition and taction
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10. Reality
• Access to and use of information is a universal
human right
• This cannot be achieved in reality
– Why?
• Not all content is digitized  Information not accessible via
web or mobile
• Language barrier  There are so many languages in the
world and it is not possible to learn them all during one’s
lifetime
• Illiteracy  980 m of the global population are illiterate
• Digital divide  Only 39% of world population access the
internet
• People with disabilities  They have special requirements
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11. Global Challenge for IM
• Bridging the gap on information requirements
of all human beings is a global challenge
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12. Solution
• The technology is regarded as the enabling
tool to satisfy the information needs of all
human beings
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13. Technology
• Rise of Information Communication Technologies
– Invention of the computer
– Advent of the internet  Information doubles every
two years
– Proliferation of mobile and portable devices
– Wireless communication
– User-friendly interfaces in devices  Transformation
from command line interfaces to user friendly and
easy to use graphical user interfaces
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14. Opportunities
• Universal access to all human knowledge
anytime, anywhere using any device
– Extract traditional wisdom and learnings from
modern sciences
– Facilitate innovation and civilization progress
through the extraction of traditional wisdom and
learnings from modern sciences
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15. Opportunities contd…
• Next generation of push technology for
multilingual, multimodal and multimedia
delivery of content via the web and mobile
technology
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16. Opportunities contd…
• Advancement of research and development of
multi-lingual and multi-modal technologies for
digitization of content and creation of digital
libraries.
– The China-US Million Book Digital Library
initiative(Huang et al., 2005)
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17. Opportunities contd…
• Valuable way of communication and
information exchange for the illiterate –
visual, voice and touch sensitive screens
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18. Opportunities contd…
• People with special needs such as travellers
especially tourists, children, elders, deafmutes and blind persons require multimodal
personalized user interfaces
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19. Opportunities contd…
• Standards like UNICODE and W3C further
enhances the effective use of web for
handling multilingual content across borders
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20. Opportunities contd…
• The availability of affordable and cost effective
open source software such as Greenstone and
Dspace promotes the building multilingual
digital libraries, websites, information systems
and databases (Biswas et al.,2010)
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21. Challenges
• Resource intensiveness
– Sufficient funds
– Material and
– Human capital resources
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22. Challenges contd…
• Converting traditional content to digital
– Certain operating systems that limit the correct display of special
characters in certain languages when represented in UNICODE
– Words pronounced phonetically are stored in a different context
– Software tools for transliteration from a specific language to UNICODE
are difficult to find or are not available
– Example: Handling multi-linguistic issues pertaining to introducing eGovernance solutions in India (Lata et al., 2006)
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23. Challenges contd…
• Visual icons used in multimodal delivery are
misunderstood by some cultures, or worse has
been offensive in some cultures
– Five sided stars replaced by seven sided or eight
sided stars when implementing an International
Children’s Digital Library (Hutchinson et al., 2005)
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24. Challenges contd…
• In multilingual digital libraries there have been
instances of the content being socially or
politically or religiously objectionable
– For example, in the International Children’s Digital
Library the fact that there were more Arabic books
than Hebrew books resulted in political concerns
related to Arab-Israeli conflict (Hutchinson et al.,
2005)
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25. Challenges contd…
• Cross language support requires translations.
• Such translations introduce three types of
errors namely lack of translations for technical
terms, acronyms, and proper names
(Diekema, 2012)
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26. Challenges contd…
• Explicit form of human knowledge cannot be
exactly replicated in the digital format but
implicitly expressed in different media such as
text, image, audio and video
– Eg: Indigenous medicines
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Vedic scripts
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27. Challenges contd…
• Lack of efficient and effective organization and
retrieval tools
– Give rise to information overload rather than
aiding the growth of knowledge diffusion and
quality enhancement
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28. Challenges contd…
• Complexities associated with use of
technology
– Some may not have the comprehension and skills
to use the technology?
– There can be others who cannot afford to buy the
technology?
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29. Conclusion
• Multilingualism increases the efficiency of
information exchange across borders.
• This is facilitated by using multimodal delivery
methods such as vision, audition, and taction
with the use of multimedia technology
• Technology is an enabler for information
management in such multi-literacy environments
• Undoubtedly, there is enormous growth potential
for the promotion of information management in
this area
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30. References
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
7)
8)
9)
10)
11)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information accessed in November 2013
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_management accessed in November 2013
http://1howmany.com/how-many-languages-in-the-world accessed in November 2013
http://www.emc.com/leadership/programs/digital-universe.htm accessed in November 2013
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate
accessed in November 2013
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_digital_divide accessed in November 2013
HUANG Tie-jun, TIAN Yong-hong , WANG Chun-li, SHI Xiao-dong , GAO Wen (2005)Towards a
multilingual, multimedia and multimodal digital library platform, Journal of Zhejiang University SCIENCE
ISSN 1009-3095
Biswas Goutam, Paul Dibyendu(2010) An evaluative study on the open source digital library softwares
for institutional repository: Special reference to Dspace and greenstone digital library, International
Journal of Library and Information Science Vol. 2(1) pp. 001-010, February, 2010
Lata Swaran, Chandra Somnath (2006) Challenges of Multilingualism and Possible Approach for
Standardization of e-Governance Solutions in India, Department of Information Technology, Ministry of
Communications & Information Technology, New Delhi 110 003, India
Hutchinson Hilary Browne, Rose Anne, Bederson Benjamin B., Weeks Ann Carlson, Druin Allison
(2005)The International Children’s Digital Library: A Case Study in Designing for a Multilingual,
Multicultural, Multigenerational Audience, Information Technology And Libraries, March 2005, pp 4-12
Diekema Anne (2012) Multilinguality in the Digital Library: A Review, Instructional Technology &
Learning Sciences, Department of at DigitalCommons@USU
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31. Thank you
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