Mortenson Center for International Library Programmes, University of Illinois Library at Urbana-Champaign

Carnegie Corporation of New York

June 2004

Introduction

The mission of every library is to facilitate access to systems of knowledge relevant to the pursuit of inquiry and study. The development of information delivery systems is a key component of knowledge discovery and modern technology greatly enhances such systems.

Libraries – academic, public or organisationally specific — have commonly been among the early adopters of any technology that facilitated service to the user population. However, the pace of technological innovation in recent years has created challenges for the most well positioned of public institutions, and the chasm of the digital divide obviously deepens for institutions within emerging countries. Aharon Kellerman in his work The Internet on Earth: a Geography of Information points out that “North America is 115 times more connected than Africa” and further notes that “within developing countries, the connected populations are predominantly urban elites.”

Our research certainly supports the observations of others, that even the premier universities of the African countries we visited are challenged by a paucity of bandwidth capacity that interferes with any networking beyond the immediately local community. These Universities expend considerable sums of money for minimal Internet access, and that access which they do have is severely constricted as nations to the West come online during the day. It is effectively a premium resource in limited supply under contention by an expanding number of users. Securing the Lynchpin: More Bandwidth at Lower Cost compiled by the Bandwidth Task Force Secretariat at the University of Dar es Salaam, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania for the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa, outlines the challenges in detail.

The implications are that sufficient bandwidth would resolve a broad range of institutional problems. Adequate bandwidth for the support of research is certainly an important element in any set of supportive measures to assist university development in the regions. However, the focus on bandwidth can also distract from several underlying factors that also affect the ability of these institutions to function not simply as users of, but as contributors to, a developing international information resource.

Few university librarians have any experience with a fully functional state of the art library, creating conceptual difficulties that affect institutional planning. Library and technology vendors are unwilling to visit African libraries or attend association meetings to demonstrate their products, limiting exposure to what is available. Because training has not been consistently and easily available, technical as well as traditional skills vary and are hard to keep up to date. University resources have become even more limited over the past thirty years, creating even greater barriers to information access and fostering a greater dependence on external funding.

This analysis attempts to identify the central issues and propose solutions that emerge from a clearer understanding of the essential problems. There are a set of issues common to all university libraries which can be addressed generally and, in some instances, cooperatively.