Nicolaus Copernicus University Library in Toruń Free Access to Information and Knowledge or Educational Exclusion?

The purpose of this article is to determine if Poland is truly open and has free access to information and knowledge in comparison to the world. Do we have a chance to build a society of knowledge with the present level of electronic communication we have? Aren’t we working on independently of the rest of the world? Aren’t we working on our exclusion from the rest of the world? To answer these questions we should analyze the access to information both its source and contents and compare Poland’s accessibility to the rest of the world [1]. First Poland is not a country, which has put the emphasis on new technologies in its strategic education development; however politicians are quick to speak but they only provide lips services to those issues when in fact their words rarely turn into action. It seems that as the member of European Union we will not follow Irish or Finnish way with the priorities on education and technology, but we will rather occupy some place in the end of this line like Greece, overeating the Union’s funds or investing inconsistently with the world’s newest trends. Witold Gadomski, one of the Gazeta Wyborcza journalists, used to write that for the EU the most important goal is to win the technological race with the USA and for the EU new members, to catch up with the ‘old ’ fifteen EU countries [2]. So called ‘Lisbon strategy’ supposes some solutions in this matter. Such thinking is quite disturbing as turns into a particular contest between two or even three parts of the world, which instead of joining the nations can divide them into those with the access to information and technology and those excluded from it. The matter of digital exclusion has been the subject of many public forums. Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations, on the conference World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva (10-12 December 2003) had a speech about the mos