Cover Story: Spreading the Literacy Message

The National Adult Literacy Database Inc. (NALD) is a non-profit organisation the mission of which, simply stated, is to provide information and resources to the adult literacy community in Canada in English and French, Canada’s official languages. This community is typically under-funded, under-resourced, isolated and remote.

A literacy program in this community can be isolated even though it is being delivered in the heart of a major city.
On the other hand, in the decade since International Literacy Year in 1990, the group of both volunteer and paid professionals that is part of this community has grown in numbers and in its capacity to address the issues. Excellent resources have been developed, often from within the community itself with funds made available by both the federal and provincial governments, to enhance the materials available in the classroom, in the workplace and for tutorial sessions. The fragmented nature of the community, however, has caused the growth and development to happen in "pockets, "usually found in urban centres. This haphazard pattern of growth has resulted in these resources (after a brief flurry of distribution immediately upon publication) not finding their way outside a ten-block radius of the location where they were created.

At NALD we recognised that the Internet and the World Wide Web presented an opportunity to change all of that. With support from the National Literacy Secretariat, a division of the federal government’s Human Resources Development Canada, and from the provincial government of New Brunswick, we set out to:

• Create a community of literacy providers on the World Wide Web so that practitioners in Canada would become aware of who is doing what and where they are;
  
• Create a resource centre for literacy information and resources so that under-funded and under-resourced programs would have access to current and useful materials no matter where they are situated in the country;
  
• Provide a platform from which practitioners could share their information and resources with others so that people would eventually come to see the NALD system as a resource that belongs to them for their use;
  
• Organise the many good educational resources available on the World Wide Web into a system that would make it easier for busy practitioners to find useful materials quickly.
  

We use a broad definition of literacy to include K-12 for adults including family and workplace/workforce literacy and English and French for speakers of other languages. We also gather resources that will support special needs groups and the vast cultural diversity that is characteristic of Canada.

In the four years since NALD’s web site (www.nald.ca) was launched in February of 1996, we have created, hosted and maintained 123 web sites for national, provincial, regional and some local literacy and literacy-related organisations in Canada with about 20 new web sites under development. There has been an observable increase in partnering and collaboration in the literacy community as we have created this visibility, and there has been a dramatic increase in the interest shown by practitioners in other countries about what is happening here!

The NALD site consists of some 35,000 pages of information such as Events, Annotated Bibliographies, Awards, Contact Information, Links to Discussion Groups, Headline News, Calls for Presenters, and so on. In the Resources sections ("The NALD Literacy Collection," "Full Text Documents" and "Literacy Newsletters" "Story of the Week") we have many excellent resources to be downloaded for use with learners or for the practitioners for their own continuing education. All these services are free of charge.

We attempt to make the NALD web site a useful source of current information and resources, easy to use, pleasant to look at and easily navigable. We present the resources in multiple formats.

We create various pathways to information. The response has been excellent. In the eight-month period ending January 31st, there were 415,971 visits to the site by people who viewed 2,295,625 pages of information and who downloaded 20,292 full documents. These numbers are beyond the wildest projections that we made four years ago when we launched this service (I might add, in the face of some degree of scepticism). We feel that this concept has found its time and place. NALD has become a major source of educational information and resources in Canada, and, because there are no territorial borders on the Internet, for others in the world as well. Many challenges remain:

• We want to post more and more educational resources because we think that this is where we can have the greatest impact and provide the greatest contribution; l We want the information and resources that we post to remain useful, current and comprehensive;
  
• We will develop on-line counselling services and "ask an expert" services to serve those programs that are located where they have no access to these basic educational supports;
  
• We are in the process of creating "thematic streams" of information and resources on our site so that users interested in family literacy or ESL for example, will be able to browse through a collection of materials organised to respond to their specific needs;
  
• We are preparing a CD-ROM version of our web site for circulation in parts of the literacy community that either have no access or limited access to the Internet, the educational programs of the federal prisons, for example. The CD-ROM version will be circulated through an annual subscription system, which will include quarterly updates.
  
• We are preparing specialty databases to provide broader access to information, e.g. The Family Literacy Directory (http://www.nald.ca/Famlit/) and the Directory of Literacy Research (http://www.nald.ca/crd/);
  
• We are working with the National Institute for Literacy (NIFL) in their LINCS project (http://novel.nifl.gov/) to create a seamless bridge between our resource offerings to provide easier access for practitioners in both the United States and Canada;
  
• We want to continue to develop a network of contributors who will let us know about what’s happening in their part of the literacy world. It is too big a challenge for us to be aware of everything. We like people to see this as their system and have them help us keep it current.
  

All in all, it has been a lot of fun. For those of you who work in the literacy community, you know that this is easy work to feel good about. We work with dedicated and enthusiastic people and serve learners who are extremely appreciative of everything that we do for them. We would be delighted to hear from you with information, resources, ideas and suggestions about the service that we offer. Help us to help you!