Susan Pasquariella, through her spirited speech and the subsequent
audience discussion, encouraged the APLIC-I community to reach beyond
their immediate professional spheres to create a cohesive source of
population information on the World Wide Web. Susan reminded us that the
very essence of our organization is to create a forum for intellectual
exchange. The Internet, she stressed, provides the means to realize
APLIC’s primary institutional goal. The Web is an opportunity to
surmount the limits of geographical distance and lack of financial and
human resources that plague our collection and information dissemination
efforts.
Approximately 300 population organizations have websites. By pooling
already existing resources, we have the foundation of a virtual public
library of population information. While the sites that exist are a rich
and valuable collection, there is a lack of cohesion that is needed to
create a truly useful and unified source. Our clients, actual and
potential, have the most to lose in this scenario. In particular, users
seeking developing nation materials are getting short shrift, because most
posting of developing country information is done by developed
country institutions and does not necessarily contain the data sought or
have the appropriate focus.
Susan encouraged us to bolster interagency relationships to create a
truly functional Internet-based population knowledge base. To adequately
serve our constituency, this collection must contain developed and
developing country materials on population, reproductive health, and
family planning topics. It must also have reference works, data, working
papers, journal articles, full-text documents, bibliographic databases,
and other resources—all available without cost. Additionally, to be
truly accessible, the database should be in several languages and in a
CD-ROM format for those without Internet access.
But can we build bridges between our disparate groups? Susan believes
this is possible and presented her own program, the United Nations
Population Information Network (POPIN) as an organization that has been
providing fertile environment in which these nexus can take place. One
example of POPIN’s efforts is the 170 websites they sponsored during the
past 2 1/2 years. These sites were designed for dissemination and are
meant to enable developing countries to share information and data about
their activities, local population/reproductive health programs and
policies, statistics, publications, and other local information on related
topics.
If the 300 population websites form the core of a virtual library,
these 170 new additions enhance the developing country content of the
cyberspace collection. POPIN also establishes a collaborative environment
to promote developing country participation in the expansion of the
Information Superhighway and encourage interregional exchange and
interaction. As two examples of the latter, Susan pointed to POPIN’s
interagency effort to create the Worldwide Directory of Population
Institutions (
http://www.popin.org/~unpopdir/, containing addresses of thousands of
institutions around the globe. Susan also referred to the multilingual
Dictionary of Demographic and Reproductive Health Terminology created with
Hopkins http://www.popin.org/~unpopterms/).
Other organizations are updating the Spanish and French sections, but
Susan called upon the APLIC-I community to modernize the English
vocabulary.
The session closed with an impromptu forum to exchange ideas about
preservation plans for electronic or digital information, whether
Internet-based information is ephemeral, and if it is, is it worth saving?
Susan also evoked such hot button issues as websites standardization and
indexing. Finally, she called upon us to think about what can be done to
facilitate the creation of the Internet-based population knowledge base as
individuals and what we need to do collectively. To this end, Susan called
upon APLIC-I to create a subcommittee as a forum to consider issues
related to interregional information exchange.