Publications and CD-ROMs valued at about US$1 million are being sent today free of charge to some 400 university libraries in 150 developing countries and countries in transition, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) announced today.
The donation is being made in recognition of the growing importance of knowledge for development. Institutions of higher learning in developing countries, and particularly the least developed among them, are often poorly endowed with documentation on such areas as globalization and development strategies, international trade, technological change and capacity-building, international investment and enterprise development -- all areas of UNCTAD’s expertise, itself a knowledge-based international organization. Developing countries’ universities generally do not have the funds, let alone the communications infrastructure, to access the Internet or often even to purchase paper for downloading documents from the WorldWideWeb if they do have access.
The UNCTAD publications, which are being sent to educational establishments with faculties or graduate schools of economics, finance, management or international relations, include the organization’s three annual flagship publications -- the Least Developed Countries Report, the Trade and Development Report, and the World Investment Report -- as well as a just-published CD-ROM edition of its Handbook of Statistics (see UNCTAD X/PRESS/21). The International Accounting and Reporting Standards Review; New Approaches to Science and Technology Cooperation; and Trade, Sustainable Development and Gender are also part of the donation. The idea is for these materials to be used as tools for the development of future generations of scholars and policy makers. This library sponsorship initiative will mark the start of an ongoing process of research sharing and interlibrary cooperation, a process of mutual exchange which will also provide regional input to the work of UNCTAD.
