PAM International Relations Committee Session
June 4, 2007
4-5:30 PM
By Nisa Bakkalbasi
International Issues in Developing Countries
Theme: “Programs to provide free or low-cost access to scholarly information to promoter higher education and research in developing countries”
Minutes by Mangala Krishnamurthy
Nisa Bakkalbasi, Chair of IRC, PAM division opened the session by welcoming attendees, speakers and thanking the sponsors Elsevier for sponsoring the session and East View Information Systems for sponsoring the IMA(International Membership Award ) winner.
The speakers at the session were:
Muhammad Shahid Soroya, 2007 PAM International Membership Award winner, librarian at the School of Mathematical Sciences at Government College University in Lahore, Pakistan.
Evviva Weinraub, Program Support Librarian for Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE), Yale University Library.
Daviess Manefee-Elsevier, Director of US Library Relations
Muhammad Shahid Soroya, started off his presentation by thanking PAM division, SLA and all members of IRC for giving him the opportunity to attend the conference and to share his work and accomplishments that he has achieved so far in his home country.
Mr.Soroya explained how he was involved in the project, Digital Library program of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) in Pakistan. Mr.Soroya is involved in several projects in his home country by taking lead role as project director to build new library, director of national Center of Mathematics. He was involved at every step of the library’s growth including designing the library, collection development. He shared with the audience how he involved all faculty and experts in the field to help him with the collection development and the result of this is, his library now has a good collection after three years. His idea of starting the yahoo group of librarians has grown into a group of over 500 members and the result of this is the creation current National Pakistan Library Association.
Mr.Soroya, using PowerPoint presentation, shared the Digital Library program of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) in Pakistan, and how it strives to meet the information needs of the higher education and research in Pakistan. This digital library provides online access to high-quality scholarly information to the scholars with access to e-books, more than 20,000 peer-reviewed journals from 35 leading publishers. Scholars have access to several other services such as British Library Document Supply Centre (fills in the request with in 10-15 days), and some funding support by Pak-US Cooperation in Science and Technology. In his presentation, Mr.Soroya touched on the user training and the digital library usage statistics of this project. It was very interesting to know that the research output has seen a tremendous growth since the start (2003) of the digital library [http://digitallibrary.edu.pk] project in his home country.
To view Mr.Soroya’s presentation slides please visit http://units.sla.org/division/dpam/irc/reports.html or go directly to the presentation http://units.sla.org/division/dpam/irc/Soroya_sla_international.pdf.
Evviva Weinraub, Program Support Librarian for Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE), explained the Yale University Library’s involvement with United Nations agencies and major publishers in developing OARE to enable developing countries to gain access to scientific literature.
Ms.Weinraub shared with the group how OARE is working towards narrowing the digital divide by providing users in the developing countries simple designed interfaces with a central management point to give technical support. This free service is provided to over 100 countries with less than $3000 GNP/Capita. This project is helping developing countries scholars’ to participate in publishing in western journals.
Ms.Weinraub mentioned Yale is involved in this project until 2015 and is committed to the project. The idea of internationalization is the main driving force for Yale University to get involved in this project. The university looks at the project and its involvement as a great partnership, community responsibility, and as a research institution, responsible to train new researchers. The alumni will look at this project as a worthy cause and support with generous contributions.
Further information on HINARI, AGORA, OARE is available at www.oaresciences.org
Daviess Menefee, Director of Library Relations for the Americas at Elsevier, spoke and shared the history of the beginning of the Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) project and Elsevier’s role in this initiative. His presentation focused on the motives for a large STM publisher to become involved in this program (and others). Elsverier’s corporate responsibility mission and charitable giving lead to the HINARI, which began in 2001 in Geneva. It started off as a
philanthropy program with over 400 Elsevier journal titles and they have committed to this until 2015. He mentioned that this is a project beneficial to all, and for publishers, in particular this is an opportunity to reach new readers, potential to attract new authors. IOP representative present at the presentation agreed with Mr. Menefee.
It was very interesting to hear that this project has raging success and it is seeing a shift of opinions and more and more publishers want to belong to the program and become successful partners. HINARI server which is based in Geneva has more than a million downloads in 2006 and the most downloaded journal is Lancet, a Clinical title. Medical Libraries Association is partnering with Elsevier in the project called “Librarians Without Borders” to train librarians in developing countries. Also, Mr.Menefee mentioned that Microsoft came to the rescue to work on the bandwidth issues to provide access in developing countries.
For more information and to learn about other Reed Elsevier corporate giving program, please visit http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authored_newsitem.cws_home/companynews05_00444
Presentations were very informative and interesting and ended on time after a lively question and answer session.
