Social Information Provision
The provision of information and advice has been one of our continuing concerns. Elaine Kempson was the founding Director of the Community Information Project which did much to support the development of Britain's information and advice network.
She undertook a series of projects in the 1980s, working with the National Consumer Council to develop a more systematic approach to the planning of advice services. She developed and tested a set of resource standards - Good advice for all - and from this produced a manual for planning services - Going for advice. This led on to reviews of provision in Leicester, Swindon and East Devon. The standards and manual that she developed still form the basis for planning the development of services.
While at the Policy Studies Institute, Nick Moore was selected to lead the National Disability Information Project, funded by the Department of Health. This was a major, four-year action research project designed to test different ways of meeting the information and advice needs of disabled people. The results were brought together in Nick's book Access to information.
More recently, Nick Moore was commissioned by the Royal National Institute for the Blind to review all the research into the information needs of people with visual impairments. The report has fed into a major review of the services provided by the RNIB. The work also led to the development of a model of social information need that has subsequently been used in a number of different environments.
As information societies develop, they alter the balance of individuals' rights and responsibilities. A paper that discusses these new rights and responsibilities in an information age that Nick Moore published in the electronic Journal of information law and technology aroused considerable interest and has since been re-published in Japan and Russia. Essentially, it argues that, in addition to the three basic rights of citizenship - civil, political and social - we need to develop a fourth set of intellectual rights