With literacy, a resource-scarce nation can create technologies, products, and services that allow it to increase its income, he explained.
Conversely, countries that have an abundance of resources but do not have quality human resources can experience a decline in income per capita, he added.
Literacy culture is the main foundation in the era of technological advancement to create people with the capability to innovate, critical thinking skills, and creativity to handle global competition.
Having reading skills is necessary. This means not just the ability and interest in reading, but also the capability to grasp content, analyze, understand, and compare with other references, and even produce goods, Bando said.
Perpusnas is implementing five stages of literacy in communities that are intended to cultivate a reading culture. The first is building the capability to read, write, and calculate, and teaching the formation of characters from an early age as a basic skill.
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The second, at the medium level, ensuring people’s access to knowledge through affordable, accurate, up-to-date, and trusted reading materials. Third, helping people develop the capability to understand the implicit rather than the explicit meaning of what they read.
Fourth, developing the capability to create innovations and using creativity for anticipating the development of science and technology, and fifth, producing quality goods and services to win global competition.
The Perpusnas has also unveiled 14 million digital books since their transformation into the digital form in March 2023.
It has produced 14 million pieces of content that can be easily accessed through mobile phones, so that they can be used to win global competition, he said during an international seminar on "Science Literacy in the Digital Era" on Tuesday.
The international seminar was organized through cooperation between Perpusnas, the Indonesian Science Academy (AIPI), Inter-Academy Partnership (IAP), Association of Academies & Societies of Sciences in Asia (AASSA), and the Communication and Information Ministry’s Directorate General of Informatics Application.
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Translator: Lintang B P, Fadhli Ruhman
Editor: Jafar M Sidik
Copyright © ANTARA 2023
