A Survey of the Current Information Activities in the Advanced Developing Countries

중진국의 정보유통체제 연구

The advanced developing countries including Korea are assumed to have reached a developmental stage which necessitates them to formulate and implement a plan for a national information network. Most of the governments in the advanced developing countries are well aware of the necessity for such a plan and some of them have actually commenced their studies on the feasibility of a national network of their own hoping to achieve maximum utility of their limited information resources. Two urgent problems facing planners in the design of a national information network are identified. One is lack of an optimum organisational model to enable them to meet their own situations, and the other is lack of a guideline to help designers evaluate the alternative structures and models when they are available. In resolving these two problems, network planners in the advanced developing countries would benefit from the achievement of the objectives of the present study. The major objective is to elicit and describe common information needs, desires and value of the people using information, and other common factors which are responsible for the present information services in the advanced developing countries and which have implications for the basic structure of the national information network. The value of this study is to aid administrators in Korea and those in the other advanced developing countries who are responsible for making national policies and who are now beginning to recognise the need for information services with the planning of economic and social development so as to enable all the groups in the community to have access to the information which are essential for decision making, research work, studies and even for recreational reading. This recognition will hopefully give them a rational basis for formulating right policies on information services. The methodology utlised for collecting the required data in this study falls under the category of observation and largely consists of the two techniques: literature review and postal questionnaire. Background information on the individual advanced developing: countries was gathered from monographic and periodical literature. and country reports presented at the various international conferences were analysed for other relevant data. For most of the data needed for the present study, a questionnaire on 'Library and Information Services as They Are Available in the Selected Countries' was formulated. This questionnaire was designed to be completed without help, by an expert who was well informed of the library and information services in his or her country. The questionnaire was intended to look in details at what information services in the advanced developing countries were doing-whom they were serving, in what way, and how well and establish to what extent they were meeting the nation's information requirements. It was also intended to ascertain the respondents' ideas on possible future developments in information provision in their countries, that is, in the advanced devanced developing countries. The questionnaire was posted to a total of 63 natinal librarians, directors of national information centres and those of other major libraries or information centres in 21 selected countries. Complete usable responses were received from 34 persons in 14 countries. In order to identify common characteristics of the information needs and desires in the advanced developing countries and the present situation of the information services to meet them, and the requirements and constraints peculiar to those countries which bought to be considered in the design of a national information network for advanced developing countries, an individual report on the current status of information activities for each of the fourteen countries chosen for this study, was presented. The procedure used was to arrange the data acquired in the questionnaire responses and other sources, in the form of fifteen country reports to be summarised by cross-section characteristics later.