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Presents an inspiring story of a determined effort to reach out to the children in high‐risk situations providing them with a charming library in old train carriages. The Library Train Project was initiated in 1999 by the railway policemen of the Railway Police Division within the Royal Thai Police. It is aimed at offering education services to homeless children as a way to reduce the crime rate and child exploitation by channelling children to more constructive activities. The library is equipped with a book collection, toys and computers. It serves as an informal classroom where learning activities take place everyday. The children learn to read and write and to appreciate cleanliness, good health and beauty from a carefully designed and nurturing environment. This paper also highlights creative approaches used by the project’s initiator, which is gaining support from governmental and non‐governmental organisations, mass media, libraries and the general public.

Taking as its starting point the view that information literacy (IL) and information literacy education (ILE) are essential for national, social and personal development in countries of the less developed world, this chapter looks at how context informs our understanding of the nature and process of IL and ILE in developing countries of the Asian region, with particular attention to Cambodia and Laos. The principal focus is on definitional issues related to cultural contexts. From the literature and from personal experience as IL/ILE trainers in SE Asia, we maintain that extant definitions and understanding of IL are principally North American in origin and focus, or largely based on the North American perception of IL and ILE. It was not until the mid-years of the first decade of this century that we saw formal recognition that IL competencies are being applied within cultural and social contexts, and that cultural factors are affecting information literacy. Our chapter contributes ‘on-the-ground’ support for this understanding. During the course of a series of IL/ILE workshops in Cambodia and Laos, a series of ad hoc focus groups was utilised to test the contextual effects on understandings of information literacy; contextualised definitions, each specific to and slightly different for individual countries, were developed. What emerged from the focus group discussions about IL was a series of definitional nuances highlighting these key points: (1) information literacy in definition and practice must be contextually grounded; (2) knowledge creation as a product of information literacy is both knowledge based and problem focused; (3) the contexts of a society must be understood quite specifically; and may be unique to each society; and (4) information literacy involves a continuum that comes from and at the same time enables new learning related to the contextual aspects of information. Given these points, we confirm that traditional definitions of IL are not particularly robust in the context of less developed Asian countries. Further, we conclude that local understanding of IL results in definitions aligned with the realities of specific societies. This in our view leads to more robust, contextualised information literacy education.