An evaluation of the information literacy of safety professionals

Abstract

Information literacy has gradually become one of the necessary qualities in current and future safety practices. The calculation and assessment of information literacy of safety professionals is an effective way to understand their information literacy level. This paper, therefore, aims to evaluate the information literacy level of safety management personnel, for improving their ability to comprehend safety language/technology/information. Based on the theory of safety information systems and the characteristics of safety professionals, this study develops an index system to assess the information literacy level of safety professionals. The index system consists of five indexes: safety information demand consciousness, safety information acquisition ability, safety information evaluation ability, safety information utilization ability, and information ethics. According to the analytic hierarchy process method, the weight of the index can be determined. This developed method was implemented to evaluate the safety information literacy level of 40 safety professionals from four different corporations. The quantitative results of the fuzzy evaluation are in good agreement with the qualitative analysis results, indicating that the index system has excellent applicability and can be applied to the evaluation of the information literacy level of safety professionals. Besides, recommendations are put forward to improve the information literacy of safety professionals.