Science and Technology Mailing List Archive

["Paul Mundy" <<address removed>>]

Colleagues:

Despite what I've said in earlier posts, research institutes and extension 
agencies do produce a fair amount of printed materials. So do donor-funded 
projects. But where are these materials? Are they accessible?

The answer is often No. Take the typical extension leaflet as an example. 
The extension agency prints 5000 copies and sends them off to extension 
workers, who (one hopes!) use them in training farmers. Once the print run 
has been used up, the leaflet is forgotten.

Soeone else -- an extension worker, farmer, NGO staff member, student  or 
entrepreneur -- needs the information, but cannot get hold of it, as there 
are no more leaflets left, and there is no money to print any more.

Three years later, time comes to write a new leaflet. No one can find the 
original leaflet, so someone has to write one from scratch.

Similar problems plague donor-funded projects. Few make their outputs 
available on the internet. Once the project is over, it is quickly 
forgotten. There is no way to easily find out what was done and how. 
Activities are duplicated, mistakes are repeated, lessons are relearned.

Technology provides the solution to this problem. As they are produced, 
archive printed materials in electronic form, and put them on the internet 
and onto CD-ROM.

Digital libraries are a good way to do this ? they allow users to search for 
text inside the document, then download the full text in printable form. 
Putting a digital library on CD-ROM means that users do not have to have an 
internet connection to use it.

Research and extension institutions have a lot of older materials in 
print-on-paper form. In Indonesia, for example, agricultural information 
institutes in each province have produced extension leaflets for the last 25 
years. Print runs have been woefully inadequate (typically 1500 copies for 
East Java, with a population of over 35 million). Making this information 
available in electronic form would enable it to reach a much larger audience 
? either directly (viewing on screen) or indirectly (download, edit and 
adapt, print out and reproduce).

Selecting, scanning and digitizing documents would be a fair amount of work, 
but would be well worth it. Distributing CD-ROMs would be far cheaper than 
distributing the equivalent amount of documents in printed format.

Suggestions for DFID:
?	Require all DFID projects to preserve their outputs in electronic format 
and make them available on CD-ROM and the Internet
?	Help research and extension institutions digitize their existing materials 
and put them into digital libraries.
?	Distribute digital libraries to users on CD-ROM and the internet.
?	Give priority to digitizing extension materials, especially in vernacular 
languages, because they have much larger audiences, and are harder to 
access, than research materials.
?	Strengthen institute libraries (woefully neglected as they are) so they 
can develop their access to electronic information.


Paul Mundy
development communication
<address removed>
www.mamud.com

_________________________________________________________________
Watch LIVE baseball games on your computer with MLB.TV, included with MSN 
Premium! http://join.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200439ave/direct/01/

=============================================================
To send a reply to this message that goes to all list members,
make sure that you send your reply to <address removed>

To unsubscribe from this list, send an email to "<address removed>", with the message body:

unsubscribe science-and-technology <your-email-address>