Barbara Aronson, Project Manager of HINARI will be addressing some vital issues in her upcoming talk "Library Development in Developing Nations: Access to Scientific Information for the Developing World" in Sterling Memorial Library on Thursday November 2nd at 11am. Based in Switzerland, Barbara Aronson overseas the dynamic HINARI project which is transforming lives all over the world. The Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative) is set up by the World Health Organization and partly sponsored by the Yale University Library. It works together with major publishers, enabling developing countries to gain access to one of the world's largest collections of biomedical and health literature. Over 3421 journal titles are now available to health institutions in 113 countries, benefiting many thousands of health workers and researchers, and in turn, contributing to improved world health.

Developing nations are trapped in a vicious circle. To improve the welfare of their populations, they must improve their economic status. But how can economic status be improved in a sustainable way when the population lacks adequate access to clean water and sanitation, to a secure food supply, to adequate health care, to education, to an acceptable level of personal security, and to all the other basic necessities of decent life? At a very basic level, it is not possible to build a healthy economy with an unhealthy work force. Furthermore, as Kofi Annan made clear in his Millennium Agenda in April 2000, all the many divides that separate poor and wealthy nations are made more extreme by the constantly growing gap in access to information and to communication technologies: the digital divide

A solution to the problems of the developing world cannot be airlifted in. If developing countries are to break out of the cycle of self-perpetuating poverty, they must be able to benefit from what has worked in other parts of the world, and they must also be able to find their own solutions to their problems. To make this possible, the digital divide must be closed (or at least narrowed), to ensure that these countries have access to essential scientific and technical information.

Since 2002, the World Health Organization's HINARI program, and its partner programs OARE (lead by UNEP and Yale) and AGORA (lead by FAO and Cornell) have worked with the major international publishers of scientific and technical information to make this essential information available free or at nominal cost in more than 100 of the world's poorest countries. These countries now have access to information that will help researchers find solutions to problems unique to their populations, and to make the best information available to assist faculty members in training students more effectively. In addition, these programs help to keep trained individuals at home, where their expertise can do the most good.

This presentation will look at what HINARI has accomplished, examine the barriers encountered, the approaches developed to overcome these, and look at the challenges for the coming years. Location: Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall, Yale University Library, followed by an informal reception. All are welcome.

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