Woody Horton is an independent management consultant retired from the Federal Government. He teaches and consults part-time both in the U.S. and abroad. Recently he has been active in the Fulbright Senior Specialist program in library and information science. Government Career: Horton began his career with the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (later the Marshall Space Flight Center) at Huntsville, Alabama, in the late 50s, following a three-year stint with the Army Counterintelligence Corps. He then became an Operations Research Analyst with the General Services Administration, and later head of the Automated Data Processing/Management Information Systems (ADP/MIS) Division. He then transferred to the Africa Bureau of the U.S. Agency for International Development where he worked in Africa on projects introducing early automation tools and techniques. Following that he worked at the State Department on organizational and management methods and approaches that could be used by U.S. Ambassadors and their “country team” at U.S. embassies abroad. He served in Vietnam for several years, and then came back to Washington where he was in charge of MIS/DP at the Environmental Protection Agency. He later became Director of Studies for the congressionally established Commission on Federal Paperwork. Recent Consultancies: During the period 1997 and 2003 Woody Horton was a consultant for the United States National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS). While with the Commission he was the lead consultant on four different activities, all having to do with strategies and approaches to improving the dissemination of government information to the public. Three of the four studies were undertaken at the specific request of the Congress. The first, funded by the Government Printing Office, was a survey of several dozen Federal agencies for the purpose of learning how those agencies were coping with the challenges involved in the increasing migration of pre-electronic government information products and services, such as microforms and CD-ROM, as well as print media, to electronic formats such as the World Wide Web. His report documented findings and made several dozen recommendations touching upon policy and technical reforms, which the Commission believed, could strengthen Federal agency policies and programs in this area. The second study was undertaken when the Department of Commerce decided to discontinue the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) on the grounds that the public could obtain government information products and services that agency produced “for free” and “more easily” by searching the Internet. Partly as a result of the findings of this study, the Commerce Department decided to retain that agency. The third study was begun at the request of Senators Lieberman and McCain, “to examine in a comprehensive way the entire set of laws, policies, and programs the government has in place to disseminate government information to the public.” Thirty-six recommendations were made to strengthen public information dissemination. Horton's last activity with the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science was to work with the National Forum on Information Literacy and UNESCO to plan and implement the Meeting of Experts on Information Literacy that took place in September 2003 in Prague, The Czech Republic, involving 40 experts from 23 different countries, and which produced the “Prague Declaration” which can be viewed on both the Forum’s website as well as the NCLIS website. Contributions to the Promotion of Information Literacy: Horton was employed as an intermittent consultant by the Information Industry Association during the 1970s at the time Paul Zurkowski, then President of that association, first introduced the concept of information literacy. Zurkowski and Horton collaborated on the association’s public pronouncements regarding the need, in the emerging Information Age (or post-industrial society to use the Daniel Bell terminology) to come to look upon an organization’s resources as highly valued, but at the same time a costly asset, much like enterprises had come to view their human, their financial, their capital, and even their natural resources during the Industrial Age. Because Horton came initially from the MIS/DP field, he had always been mindful of the need to distinguish between computer literacy and information literacy. He wrote a number of articles on that subject during that time-period, including articles for the American Society for Information Science and the Government Computer News. Publications: Under the name Forest W. Horton Jr., Horton has authored or edited 30 books in his fields of interest, including information literacy, and has written over 300 articles that have been published in the scholarly press, in popular media, and in trade magazines. Contact Information: Forest Woody Horton, Jr. Apt. B901 500 – 23rd Street NW Washington, D.C. 20037 USA f.w.hortonjr@att.net

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Dr. Lana Jackman
Sharon Weiner
Co-Chairs, National Forum on Information Literacy