Distribution: limited PGI-96/COUNCIL.XI/6
Paris, 1 October 1996
Original: English

A. Introduction

1. Recommendation 3 of the 10^th Session of the Intergovernmental Council for the General Information Programme (November 1994) urged UNESCO to “intensify its endeavours towards encouraging the production, dissemination and preservation of educational, scientific and cultural information taking into consideration the rapid development of communication technologies, particularly information superhighways”.

2. Following this recommendation, and in order to initiate a discussion of the PGI Council on the elements of strategy that UNESCO may adopt to cope with the rapid emergence of the “Information Society”, the Secretariat of PGI has prepared the present document, at the request of the Bureau of the Intergovernmental Council for PGI.

3. By doing so, it is felt that PGI requires an enlarged and more comprehensive mandate focusing on all issues pertaining to information, including activities in the areas of information and communication technologies as well as information highways, as indicated in Resolution 15 adopted by the General Conference its twenty-eighth Session (November 1995). This in no way implies that PGI abandon its traditional activities. Considerable effort and funding will continue to be directed towards archives, libraries and national information policies. Libraries, especially public libraries, and archives, will be targeted specifically in order to lessen the growing information gap between developed and developing countries.

B. THE CONTEXT

4. Our world is entering a new era and the magnitude of the revolution we are witnessing bears comparison with the invention of the alphabet or the printing press. The information and communication revolution is not merely a technological or an industrial revolution. It goes much deeper, because at the heart, it is a revolution of our vision of the world, the way in which we represent this vision and how we act upon it.

5. The invention of alphabets eliminated the need to use an esoteric, hieroglyphic writing systems, and allowed writing to be used for intellectual, commercial or exchange purposes. The printing press also provided a unique opportunity for a wide and cheap access to books.

6. The present revolution may be compared to the appearance of a new alphabet (the universality of digital representation) and a new printing press (with new functions : ubiquity, instantaneity, the duplicative power of the Internet). As a result, content will now be of supreme importance - “content matter matters”. The key factor to be considered is indeed representation itself, with all its levels of complexity (from data to models, from policies to philosophies). Hardware and software problems and costs will certainly continue to be important, particularly for the developing world. But some companies already market $500 complete PCs specially adapted for the Net. Moreover, the intrinsically low economic cost of using the Internet is literally embedded in its conception. In addition, digitization opens up a totally new dimension for access to information and new possibilities for textual and audio-visual retrieval.

7. Content is primordial in the emerging info-civilisation, and UNESCO the United Nations Organization with the clearest mandate for content-related questions (from education to culture, from scientific methodologies to information and communication policies) must seize this historical opportunity to exercise it.

8. The creation of PGI, in 1977, was based on the growing recognition that specialized information and its transfer between and among nations are important tools for social and economic development. The action of PGI concentrated on assistance to Member States in developing infrastructures, documentation centres, archives and libraries; the “Memory of the World Programme” as a part of PGI was developed to safeguard the documentary heritage of all peoples and to ensure universal access to it.

9. The information and communication revolution requires that UNESCO in general, and PGI in particular, concentrate on content and this is the basis for PGI's renewed mandate which may be summed up by two key phrases : public bits (digitized information in the public domain) and virtual links.

10. PGI will promote access, by the world at large, and will strive to weave as many significant public bits as possible across the enormous complexity of the global Web. The idea of “significance” is twofold : ability to select, capacity to create added value.

C. THE NEW MANDATE

11. The new mandate of the General Information Programme will concentrate on the following fields : Memory of the World, The Public Domain On-line,Virtual Laboratories,Virtual Learning Communities, Governance in the Information Age, Training of Information Specialists and Libraries and Archives as Gateways to the Information Highways

Memory of the World

12. The Memory of the World programme has the potential to become one of the most wide-reaching programmes ever launched by UNESCO. In order to achieve this ambition, it is essential to make it highly visible in the most efficient way. The Internet and the Web server that PGI has started to create, are an ideal tool for that purpose. But on-line presentation and access are not the only objectives. It will be important to plan for increased synergy from mixed media strategies, and from on-line and off-line complementary developments. Combined use of the Internet and of CD-ROM capacities could result in taking advantage of the best of both worlds (interactive and groupware applications on the Internet, can be supported by rich data bases disseminated in CD-ROM formats at very low cost).

13. Memory of the World is about both preservation and access and the two are equally important. However, preservation is a means and access is an end to be achieved. In a time of scarce resources, the preservation of documents to which accessibility will provide the greatest benefit should be privileged. Fortunately, digitization ensures a quasi indestructible way to safeguard any type of information, and the digitization of full text information is well adapted to policies and practices of easy accessibility. The goals of preservation and access, in the Memory of the World programme, should then be closely combined as the basis for a policy of digitization and on-line access.

14. The production of CD-ROMs is costly, intellectually demanding and requires above all a creative publication programme. Products of the Memory of the World Programme must have a strong intellectual base capable of integrating and correlating different cultures over long periods of time such as the framework provided by the “Silk Roads” project”. Other successful promotion and publication programmes, such as those of the World Heritage Centre and the Music of the World series, which cover homogeneous material, have a more limited scope.

15. Given the variety and the heterogeneity of the data with which the Memory of the World Programme is concerned, in order to avoid a plethora of diverse and incoherent products a marketable "editorial concept" and a strong brand image have to be developed.

16. For this reason the new strategy proposed for the Memory of the World Programme, is oriented towards the systematic digitization of data which is deemed to be of major interest, and towards the on-line accessibility of that data combined with an off-line cheap repository of raw data on CD-ROMs and the creation of networks of mirror sites at regional or sub-regional levels.

17. This low-cost strategy will allow for a systematic preservation of the data, guarantee public accessibility, encourage third parties to join UNESCO's efforts and add new layers of potential added value. In other words, the more bits that become accessible, the greater the opportunities for the " market " to take advantage of this data to refine it and to transform it into cultural products. Another advantage of this strategy is that it allows the cultural products thus created (be it Web sites or CD-ROMs) to be distinct from the original collections. In other words, it might be much more valuable and creative to design a CD-ROM on calligraphy with excerpts of examples from various libraries or archives from different countries, than to make a CD-ROM on just one collection, whose interest might not be sufficiently proven as a whole, when carefully selected excerpts could very well be combined with other sources.

18. The "Virtual Memory of the World " Web site presently being established with the limited time, funds and staff available is intended to demonstrate the possibilities of the new communication and information technologies for the Memory of the World Programme; strong impetus to this line of action should be given after approval by the PGI Council.

19. The long-range goal will be the establishment of a network of decentralized web sites in Member States, with UNESCO playing a catalytic, overall promotion and inter-linking role.

The Public Domain On-Line

20. The information market is taking care of itself with its own powerful means. Whatever is judged to have a market value is disseminated and may generate a fair return. However, there are huge areas that the info-market seems to neglect, for different reasons : insufficient potential profitability, small readership, or more paradoxically, the public nature of the original data. For instance, when data is produced by official or governmental bodies, it may not be promoted as aggressively and as widely as it would have been if the same information had been produced in a private environment. In the information industry context, this is an excellent example of the fact that when something belongs to everybody, nobody in particular seems to be motivated to take care of it. Since no immediate profit is expected from it, precisely because of its public nature, there is no willingness to promote access to it and immense reserves of such information in the " public domain " are thus often not sufficiently known to potential users. Thus governments, public organizations and NGOs may have very rich and diverse information which would benefit from being monitored, digitized and accessed with Internet servers.

21. Different projects such as the Global Information Alliance or the Global Digital Library Initiative aim at reinforcing such accessibility of information in that public domain. In addition, a number of international organizations, such as the Agence de co-opération culturelle et technique (ACCT) have initiated similar activities. In this context, particular attention should be given to activities of governmental records and archives management agencies. UNESCO should play a key role in co-ordinating the various activities that are now flourishing in many Member States.

22. UNESCO could be a virtual focal point for the ever-growing number of Web sites promoting better on-line access to information in the public domain.

23. The key areas concerned should naturally include all information a priori devoid of any copyright, either because the information or the data has fallen into the public domain (and most of the artistic and literary masterpieces of the past fall into this category...), or because the information has been produced by public organizations.

24. Another line of development of this " public domain on-line " concept is the growing quantity of information produced by persons who are willing to let their intellectual productions be disseminated widely, without trying to obtain a financial return, on the condition that their name be attached to the information thus disseminated. It is the concept of " copy-left ". UNESCO could be the promoter of a virtual repository for " copy-left " intellectual or artistic productions, freely available on-line, and exert its moral patronage to guarantee the registration of the works under the name of the authors. UNESCO would thus be the equivalent of the Chemical Abstracts organization for all intellectual production falling into the category of " copy-left ".

25. Finally, another aspect is the problem of " fair use ". In the pre-digital world, the Jeffersonian concept of " fair use " was a balanced response to the rights of intellectual property owners in favour of information users. Thus the very concept of library was made possible. But with the rapid advance of digitization, some copyrights holders are going so far as to question the existence of " fair use " for electronic media. This difficult problem should be carefully analyzed and monitored. UNESCO should take the leadership and establish a high level working group on these complex matters.

26. The above questions of access to information, and particularly that of promoting a vibrant public domain while protecting legitimate private interests, are key policy concerns of developing countries. PGI should strive to develop advisory services to governments on the establishment of national and regional policies on copyright issues related to information technologies, on the development of electronic cultural industries, and on promotion of the Internet as a public utility accessible to all at the lowest possible cost. In this context, particular attention should be given to strengthening interaction with the private sector.

Virtual Laboratories

27. New methods of work which were still unthinkable just a year ago are now possible. Combining the Internet, virtual reality, real time 3D computing, Net-phone technologies, groupware and virtual team work, it is now possible to create permanent " invisible colleges " of scientists on elaborate research subjects, at almost no cost. The principal objective is to link countries in the South to the practices already firmly established among researchers and scientists in the North, in order to provide access to scientific information more quickly, on a larger scale, in an interactive format and to disseminate it more rapidly. It is a possible answer to the South-North brain drain, allowing scientists from the South to be virtually associated to all key discussions taking place in the " invisible colleges ".

28. The objective is not merely to equip laboratories from developing countries with the necessary hardware (less and less costly) and with Internet connectivity. This should indeed be done. But the real stake lies now in developing the most appropriate methodology for the specific needs of the different scientific communities.

29. UNESCO should act as a technological watch body for applications of virtual communities technologies, and should launch experiments of virtual collaboration between laboratories from the North and the South. A wide variety of groupware techniques should be experimented with, from e-mail and discussion groups to 3D virtual laboratories, using advanced " tele-virtuality " technologies. In these experiments, the participating scientists should be intimately involved in selection and assessment of the technologies to be used, and should be encouraged to develop needed discipline and project-oriented adaptations (for example, interfaces with scientific instruments, distributed data collection and evaluation, and use of reference databases).

30. PGI should work closely with other relevant programmes within UNESCO and with international scientific organizations, to ensure that the results of the experiments are widely disseminated and evaluated by the research community with a view to catalyzing new virtual research groups and promoting the continuing development of appropriate information technologies.

Virtual Learning Communities

31. Life-long learning and distance learning already have a long and well-documented history. However, in modern society, learning has become more and more an integral part of life as a rapidly changing and increasingly competitive world forces people continuously to acquire new knowledge and skills. The concept of learning has changed, not only with regard to its content but also in the sense that learning opportunities are increasingly expected to be available, accessible and affordable to all, throughout peoples' lives. Developing countries face an additional, critical need for open learning opportunities, since they must cope with the vast majority of the world's 900 million illiterate adults and some 130 million children who are not in school, and many more unsatisfied school leavers, whom traditional formal schooling systems have only been able to reach to a very limited extent. UNESCO's response to these problems has been to look beyond existing classroom borders through the creation of an intersectoral Learning Without Frontiers Programme that aims to promote diversified and open learning systems in the perspective of lifelong learning, taking the appropriate advantage of the potential of modern information technologies.

32. Educators believe that the failures of many past educational technology applications have been due to the fact that they were ill-adapted to the culture of the learners, insufficiently interactive, too expensive, or tried to replace rather than reinforce the role of the teacher. PGI can work with the educational community to contribute to the development of cost-effective mixes of technology augmented learning channels, taking the best advantage of new concepts of on-line connectivity, virtual environments and groupware methodologies. The reason that these potentialities have not yet been widely exploited is simple: they are very recent, and in fact mostly at their development stage.

33. It is worth noting that 3D virtual communities are now proliferating, in the wake of new on-line services (from Microsoft to IBM or Intel). A virtual world is an interactive computer simulation which enables individuals, members of the virtual community to see, hear, use and even modify the simulated objects in a computer-created world. Inhabitants in a successful virtual world have a sense of presence in that world. Members of a virtual community have a heightened sense of presence in this artificial world, since they can communicate with each other in the context of the simulated world. Virtual communities can provide the settings for effective teleconferencing, and for productive, remote co-operative work.

34. Such virtual worlds raise many technical challenges, and are expected to have an impact on many aspects of human life, from immersive entertainment, to telerobotics, to training and education. One of the lofty goals of virtual world research is to make access to information as easy as looking, and to make control of information as easy as walking and touching.

35. The shared presence of virtual communities greatly enhances the opportunities for effective educational applications. However, these communities are still oriented towards entertainment rather than education, due in large part to the many, little-understood, complex problems concerning the creation and implementation of virtual worlds and the evolution of virtual communities, and particularly virtual learning communities. Some of the issues are clearly technological. But many of the unexplored questions are ethical issues, which need to be addressed by philosophers; behavioural issues, which need to be addressed by psychologists; and applications issues, which need to be addressed by subject matter experts such as educators. Research into virtual communities is interdisciplinary by its very nature.

36. PGI will investigate the applicability of virtual communities to education at all levels, and in particular peer tutoring, co-operative learning, and problem-solving. Rich social interactions can happen in simple virtual environments. In fact, graphics is not even a requirement for social interaction, as research on interactions in textual role-playing software environments called MUDs (Multi-User Domains) shows.

37. It is proposed to organize a systematic technological watch, focusing on the possible fall-outs of this rapidly evolving field, and to conduct, in close co-operation with the Education Sector, a number of pilot projects to support Learning Without Frontiers in terms of different levels of education, target communities and development conditions.

38. The objectives of PGI's activity in this area include seeking answers to the following questions, with particular attention to their relevance to development problems.

• How can virtual worlds be used to provide assistance to teachers and students from other partners on remote site (other teachers and students, industrial partners, community volunteers etc.)?
• Can students learn better by expressing their understanding of complex subjects through simulation and acting out roles within them?
• Can improved teaching techniques be propagated between schools and countries by means of collaborative world-building projects?
• What user interface and simulation techniques are best suited to the support of multi-age virtual learning communities? What is the appropriate combination of these techniques and traditional technologies and teaching methods?
• Where are the technical bottlenecks? What new tools and systems need to be invented and built?

Governance in the Information Age

39. Governments world-wide are seeking to improve their efficiency and impact in response to rising expectations of citizens and financial constraints in the public sector. The information technology revolution is providing major opportunities to help governments to respond to these new needs. Developing countries, in particular, are poised to benefit from these opportunites, provided that they adapt their action to national and local needs. The areas to be considered in this context are the following:

1. Improved efficiency of government through access to internal and external information. Governments can benefit from the virtual community concept discussed above. Telematics technologies can be used within governments, particularly internal networks ("Intranets") integrating groupware functionality and facilitating internal access to policies, regulations, procedures, documentation and correspondence, to ensure direct links to external databases and to the Internet, thus providing decision support tools which make use of all available information.

1. On-line support for government services. Government services are more efficient if citizens can rapidly access them through on-line services containing information on administrative requirements. Interactive applications can save citizens' time and government expense by enabling people to make rapid provision of information needed by government. In developing countries, on-line government services can readily be provided in government offices or community centres, using custom interfaces accessible to the target populations including illiterate citizens. Co-operation will be established with the Government on-line project of the G7 and PGI will be involved in the follow-up of the Information Society and Development (ISAD) Conference (Midrand, South Africa, 13-15 May 1996).

1. Enabling citizens to provide feedback on policies and problem solving and to participate more actively in the democratic processes. Information technologies are particularly useful to local and community governments, which are widely receiving increasing authority and responsibility without necessarily having adequate infrastructures and financial means. Telematics technology can enable the civil society to receive, generate and disseminate information on community life, can put communities "on the map" nationally and internationally, and can be used by local authorities to poll opinion. Much can be done in these directions with a single point of access in a community centre or public library .

40. The concept of on-line government could be further developed through regional and international co-operation. For example, the establishment of Internet links between Parliaments and their world organization, the Inter-Parliamentary Union, could be encouraged fostering co-operation, e.g. in establishing databases on legislative debates and decisions to be made available internationally at very low cost.

41. Finally, the Internet, given its strategic nature, should be considered by governments as a public utility tool. A fundamental objective, particularly in developing countries, should be to keep the cost of the Internet accessibility as low as possible.

Training of Information Specialists

42. Assisting Member States to build their information and communication capacities means assisting in the training of users and providers of the information networks and of trainers in these fields. Training programmes must take into account the fact that the new information and communication technologies create a new type of profession requiring the adaptation of the traditional professions, i.e. archivists, librarians and documentalists.

43. The new mandate of PGI will therefore include the development of training programmes in the fields of retrieval methods, strategies for network navigation, techniques for the development of information services to be made available on the networks, training programmes for the establishment of new forms of knowledge organization (" 3D virtual libraries ", " mental landscapes " and " meta-navigation tools ").

44. Special emphasis will be given to training in developing countries. A pilot project for the establishment of a training programme for the development of World Wide Web sites with contents related to UNESCO's fields of competence is envisaged.

45. Assistance projects will be established for the development of new curricula and their application, using the possibilities of new communication and information technologies such as virtual laboratories and universities and distance learning methodologies.

Libraries and Archives as Gateways to Information Highways

46. The various types of information institutions, which are the natural foci for access to information needed for development, have not been able to exploit their potential to the full in many developing countries. In some of these countries, the public library system is based essentially on the model of the industrialized countries of serving readers in major towns and cities, while in others the concept of public libraries was never very popular, and libraries were restricted to the elite, e.g. in universities, and largely inaccessible to the general public. Most major libraries, archives and documentation centres, facing budgetary restrictions in the public sector, have experienced serious difficulties in maintaining infrastructure, staff and collections and have thus been limited in their attempts to modernize and adapt their services to development needs.

47. It is essential that information institutions take advantage of information technology to pool and increase their resources and provide their users access to the information available at community, national and international levels. A major challenge of PGI will be to help to mobilize and empower information professionals towards this goal, and promote the provision of cost-effective, multiple development-oriented services, making use of appropriate information technologies. These include the problems of conversion of information presently only available in analogue form for digital dissemination and the preservation of electronic documents. Particular attention will be given to improving infrastructures to optimize the use of digital communication technologies in developing countries.

48. Activities will include:

1. support for the development of infrastructure at national and regional level;

1. assistance to major information centres to acquire and exploit information technologies which will enhance services for information retrieval, library loan requests and electronic document delivery;

1. promotion of public libraries as the nuclei of pilot community information centres with technology support to provide information support for literacy campaigns, basic and non-formal education and extension services, disseminate information on government programmes and provide facilities for creating and exchanging community related information;

1. networking of information institutions at national and regional level, and co-operation with telecommunication authorities and operators to enable access by information institutions to telecommunication facilities and to hardware and software at affordable cost.

49. These activities will be carried out in close co-operation with governmental development programmes and with concerned intergovernmental, non-governmental, professional and community organizations.

D. IMPLEMENTING THE NEW MANDATE

50. The implementation of the proposed new mandate will require sufficient budgetary provisions and the adaptation of the intergovernmental structure of the programme and its administration within the Communication, Information and Informatics Sector.

Intergovernmental Structures

51. UNESCO's governing bodies may wish to renew not only the General Information Programme, but also the International Informatics Programme, and to develop a strategy to optimize co-ordination between them. Some Member States have proposed the creation of an Intergovernmental Council on issues related to information highways and have confirmed the key role which PGI should play in this context.

Organisation of the Information and Informatics Division

52. The Division of Information and Informatics, which is responsible for planning and implementing the General Information Programme and the International Informatics Programme, will be restructured in order to increase its efficiency and effectiveness.

E. CONCLUSION

53. The above programme proposals are seen as an extension of PGI's continued efforts in the new technological context. The evolution of the Information Society is in a sense a tribute to the work of archivists, librarians and documentalists over more than a century, and it is clear that it can only be successful with the participation of archives, libraries and other information institutions.