Document Type : Original Article

Authors

• leila Namdarian ¹
• Behrouz Rasouli ²

¹ Associate Professor, Information and Society Research Department, Iranian Research Institute for Information Science and Technology (IranDoc), Tehran, Iran

² Assistant Professor, Information and Society Research Department, Iranian Research Institute for Information Science and Technology (IranDoc), Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Background and Objectives: The concept of “information policy” emerged in the early 1960s as a direct response to relevant fields to the information (Browne, 1997). Information policy is necessary for avoiding deficit/inaccurate and incoherent exploitation of the information, wasting time, failing innovation, and losing popularity and efficient exploitation of information and information technology and acquiring competitiveness advantage in the ever-changing environment. However, Browne (1997) believed that information policy has been haphazard and sparse instead of being systematic until the end of the 20th century. Sillince (1994) also highlighted this dispersion in Europe. Despite the researchers’ emphasis on the efficiency of systematic and coherent information policymaking at the national level, it has received scant attention within the past years. For instance, The United States, as a pioneer in the information policy paradigm, still lacks a coherent and ubiquitous policy at the national level (American Library Association, 2019). Lack of this national policy in India (Rajaram, Jeyachitra, & Swaroop Rani, 2015), Australia (Chatfield and Christopher, 2016), and other countries (Fog, 2017) is evident. Interestingly, the lack of such a systematic and coherent approach to policymaking is a challenge for the national information policy (Jaeger et al., 2015). The absence of a systematic view towards information policy has resulted in difficulty grasping the nature of this new field and its slow maturation in many countries. Nevertheless, the governments shirk their responsibilities considering these approaches. Anyway, information policy is an accepted area of information studies (Browne, 1997). However, similar to many other areas in this field, it is still at the stage of developing its conceptual and theoretical principles. In Iran, information policy has not been scrutinized systematically. Acquiring a coherent policy requires clarifying the depth and breadth of information policy. Inaccurate knowledge about these dimensions leads to the haphazard policy making for information at all levels of the society, government, and industry. No systematic and comprehensive framework is found in the scholarly works which encompasses information policy dimensions and constituents in order to provide a model for the policy and decision makers. The main purpose of the current study is to identify and categorize the information policy dimensions and components systematically.
Methodology: The research method used in this study is meta-synthesis. Meta-synthesis is a qualitative method that mixes the information and findings extracted from other qualitative studies and compare them with the topic under the study. Conducting such studies, the researchers identify several terms that present a more comprehensive view of the phenomenon under the study. To identify the required and appropriate dimensions for the proposed framework of national information policy, the following steps were taken (See Figure 1).
 
Figure 1. Steps were taken to identify the thematic areas of information policy
The searching strategy for this study: The current study addressed the following question “What are the dimensions and components of national information policy?” through a systematic examination of the studies. The statistical population consisted of all relevant studies to the national information policy on the global databases including Web of Science, SCOPUS, and local ones, namely Magiran and SID in Tir 1398. The terms “information policy” and “issue areas in information policy” were looked for in such fields as title, abstract, and keywords of the global databases. The Persian equivalents of the aforementioned terms were searched for in the local databases. A total of 1000 and 25 records (having omitted the repeated records) were retrieved in the global and local databases, respectively. To examine the research question, the works were entered into EndNote 7 and were scrutinized in terms of the relevance of their title to the research purpose, accessibility, relevance of the abstract, and content. Having examined the title and abstract, 42 full-text English works were selected (No related Persian work was found). Having studied the full-text works, 15 English ones were selected to be included in the corpus of the study. It is worth noting that snowball sampling was used and three works related to the current study were identified in the reference sections of the collected works. Finally, 18 works were included in the ultimate sample and were analyzed. 
 
Findings: The main and secondary identified dimensions for the national information policy are as follows:

Human resources and skills- the secondary dimensions include information literacy, information resources management skills, education, and training information experts.
Rules and regulations- the secondary dimensions include intellectual property rights, access to information, censorship.
Information society and its infrastructure- secondary dimensions include overcoming digital gap, social use of information, public sector and electronic government, private sector and electronic business, developing and enhancing libraries, archives, and public access center.
Broadcast and telecommunication- secondary dimensions include media rights, international flow of data and information, global access, network development, public and private sector roles.
Information markets- secondary dimensions include market information, pricing policies.

 
Discussion: Considering the growing significance of information and competitiveness in the society, the policymakers are recommended to search for a comprehensive and independent policy at the national level.  Such an independent policy leads the country toward a powerful information society. This independent policy has gradually entered the macro policy-making discourse in developed countries like the United States (American Library Association, 2019). The national information policy requires a comprehensive and independent framework that acts as a basis for making various plans. The findings of the current study revealed that a national information policy framework encompasses six main dimensions including human resources and skills, rules and regulations, information society and its infrastructure, broadcast and telecommunication, information section, and information markets. In this sense, the rules and regulation dimension was the most frequently identified one which might be of higher importance.
The national information policy dimensions should entail all stages of the information life cycle in all areas of individual and collective life. The information life cycle includes interwoven stages, that is, if a stage encounters a problem, the other ones may be influenced. Hence, the national information policy should provide the required legal framework for all the aforementioned dimensions in various stages of this cycle (from creation to use). As a result, the current study attempted to propose a framework that covers the dimensions and relevant themes in each of the stages of the information life cycle.
The proposed framework presents the policy and decision-makers with a model to form a ubiquitous policy and take action for creating, dissemination, and exploiting information and form one of the major infrastructure for an information society. Although it was tried to enhance the credibility and generalizability of the findings and proposed framework of the current study, further studies should examine its validity. Future research can examine a wide range of policies via the proposed framework in the current study and analyze the comprehensiveness of the national information policy in these documents. Since the proposed framework was based on the scholarly literature, it fails to cover new emerging issues in various information areas. Hence, a particular institution should scrutinize and explore the emerging themes in the field of national information policy.

Keywords

• National information policy
• Information policy
• Laws and Regulations
• Information Access
• Information Society

Main Subjects

• Knowledge Management