Missingham, R. (2009). Encouraging the digital economy and digital citizenship. The Australian Library Journal , 386-399.

Missingham’s article covers the plight of Australian libraries banning together to facilitate and connect Australians to the open access of a broad range of electronic resources. It covers the challenges faced and overcome to initiate the ‘opt-in/opt-out’ subscription model allowing more than 8.5 million Australians access to authoritative databases through participating libraries (Missingham, 2009, p. 386).  The article also brings to light the limited access issues still experienced in rural Australia.  It is comforting to read that while these issues are still encountered there is the support and collaboration of the Electronic Resources Australia (ERA) group working for this cause (Missingham, 2009, p. 391).

Missingham states that in 2009 our understanding of what it means to be an Australian citizen encompasses participation in government and the economy via the digital environment (Missingham, 2009, p. 386). This statement clearly highlights the importance of community access to online information. It is backed by Minister Tanner who announced that it must be realised in politics that non-sensitive government information that does not breach privacy laws should be shared among Australian citizens (Tanner, 2009).

The article illustrates the challenges of being able to access the digital environment such as computer access, access to reliable content, afforable access to broadband and for some parts of rural Australia not having broadband access at all. 

It is particularly important for the education sector to have access to the digital environment and quality resources to support research needs. Missingham draws attention to the cost of subscribtions for databases and that often they can only be funded by large budgets organisations such as universities (Missingham, 2009, p. 388). 

The National Library of Australia played a crucial role in examining key issues aligned with database subscribtions and in 2007 it was agreed that an ‘opt in/opt out’ model, establishing a consortia buying group would signicantly reduce costs to benefit participating libraries and inturn offer a wider range of digital access to the public (Missingham, 2009, p. 386).

Missingham’s article emphasises the accommplishment of reducing costs of database access in public libraries and facilitating the access to the digital environment via libraries.  The article includes much statitical information but only touches on other areas such as, developling community literacy skills in order to be able to successfully negotiate the internet once accessed and further investigation is needed on how rural Australia is overcoming the issue of limited access to information both print and digital. How have we progressed in this area and what is being done to facilitate this?