GILAS update

I interviewed Mr. Luigi Bernas, program director of GILAS last Tuesday and I must say it was a very productive interview. Without preempting my column for Monday because it will be entirely different from this post, the program has a lot of room for librarians to make use of their talents to help the program in terms of training and monitoring.

Luigi admitted to me during the interview that they are rather liberal with the training of teachers and students and leaves it to volunteer organizations, like Microsoft and NGOs how to conduct the literacy classes and that they have yet to develop an assessment tool. They have consulted with a group of academics with Ph.Ds whose services they have contracted in a previous project but they were not convinced of the tool that was developed and they were being charged tens of thousands of dollars for it. Yup, you read it right, in dollars.

So I told him about my thesis on information literacy and how I developed my own tool to assess the information literacy skills of my respondents and explained to him that maybe their consultants couldn't come up with an assessment tool because they are not aware of the skills that are supposed to be measured, which was precisely what Luigi thought, too. And before the end of the interview he told me he was going to recruit me for the project. I'm so looking forward to the invitation. I might bring in a couple of librarians into the picture.

I mentioned to him, too, about a similar effort being done by IFLA/Unesco in the country and I asked him if he was willing to work with them to which he agreed to.

So where do we librarians fit in? As I wrote earlier, in training teachers and educating students and monitoring their progress. These are the areas they are most in need of assistance since they take care of finding the resources to fund the project. They need an organization with a nationwide reach to monitor the program and who has such a network? None other than PLAI.

I don't know where this is going to lead me to but I hope if I get the chance to bring in librarians into the program they'd be up to the challenge.