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Bishop Receives IMLS National Leadership Grant

May 4, 1999
For more information, contact Assistant Dean for Communications Marlo Welshons at (217) 244-4643 or -welshons, at uiuc.edu-.

CHAMPAIGN, IL—In the midst of the information age, a dangerous digital divide is growing between information "haves" and "have-nots." Those who are already information poor are becoming more impoverished as government bodies, community organizations, and corporations turn to the Internet for distribution of their valuable information and resources, cutting off access for those who cannot afford the technology. Graduate School of Library and Information Science professor Ann Bishop is working to break down the barriers and build community capacity through collaborative projects to develop networked community information services.

Bishop has been successful in her efforts thus far. First, she co-founded Prairienet, East-Central Illinois' community network. Then, she became principal investigator for the Community Networking Initiative (CNI), a $1.3 million project aimed at improving participation of low-income neighborhoods in Prairienet by making network accounts and computer hardware available to low-income residents. Through CNI, teens are trained to repair and distribute donated computers to households in their neighborhoods. Now, Bishop has received a two-year, $218,872 federal grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to support further work in this area.

The grant will fund a partnership between Prairienet and SisterNet, a local grassroots social network of African American women committed to addressing physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual health issues at the community level. The project will focus squarely on understanding the social context that has led to the formation of the digital divide, and work to develop models for public libraries to collaborate with under-served groups in the creation of innovative web-based information services relevant to people's everyday lives. SisterNet Coordinator Imani Bazzell speaks to the importance of public libraries to such a project: "If you want to open the library's doors and be inviting to Black women, that means transforming the whole organization and how you do things. If the library wants to make sure it reaches members of that community, it needs to alter its relationships with them. Libraries should not just serve information; they should help build the community's capacity to create information."

For more information about Prairienet and the Community Networking Initiative, see http://www.prairienet.org. The Institute of Museum and Library Services can be found at http://www.imls.gov/.