Information for Research in Developing Countries: Information Technology – Friend or Foe?
Subbiah Arunachalam · Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology · 2003
In those days, there were very few journals.The journals, most of them published in the West, took a few months to arrive in India by sea, and to that extent Indian scientists were behind their Western counterparts in the matter of access to information.In contrast by the 1960s and 70s, there were approximately 50,000 research journals and many libraries in India could subscribe at best only to a few hundreds.Also, for some reason, interlibrary lending never did pick up in India (and most other parts of the developing world).The net result was that scientists in developing countries suffered a great deal of relative disadvantage compared to their Western counterparts.Today many institutions in developing countries cannot afford to maintain good libraries.Most libraries in sub-Saharan Africa have not subscribed to any journal for years."If scientists in many African universities often have to rely on what they are told by newspapers, by friends or Time magazine, how can they ever compete with scientists in USA and Western Europe when there is such a vast difference in their ability to access information, either through print media or electronically?" asks Seun Ogunseitan, the Nigerian journalist-turnedinformation provider.Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, the bestfunded library among all Indian institutions of higher education, has an annual library budget of approximately Rs 90 million (about $1.8 million).Only a handful of Indian libraries have a budget of around Rs 10 million (about $200,000) -peanuts Feature 15508366,