The article reports on a large-scale comparative research regarding public-access venues, the same which is the theme of this other paper.
This paper gives a longer explanation about the sampling and the framework which was used to do the study. The final results are not out, yet. The research question is: "What are the information needs and opportunities to strenghten institutions that offer public access to information and communitcation, especially to underserved communities, and especially through the use of digital ICT?
The paper gives some overview of the findings, with tables comparing numbers from different countries, and highlighting specificities of each country. It divides the findings in three levels:
- First level findings: Regional-trends
- Second level findings: New understanding of access, capacity and environment
- Third level findings: emerging insights to explore further
Among this three levels, it brings some interesting insights, for example
- Eastern Europe and Eurasia have a historic trust in public libraries, and that this could be observed in the study.
- In Latin America, cybercafés are extremely popular.
- The question about geography (access is mostly concentrated around bigger cities)
- Appropriation of technology is a commoon concern among researchers
- Lack of trained workers reported in more than half of the countries
- Lack of locally revelevant content.
- Integration into daily routine (difficulty to get to the venues)
- Trust in the technology, seen as something useful (there is a lack of recognition that there is an information gap)
- Competition for scarce government resource
With this information, a ranking system was developed and the countries, classified: Lower barriers, Medium Barriers and Stronger Barriers. This is a preliminary framework, which will be review after the completion of the study.
Coward, C., Gomez, R. & Ambikar, R., 2008. Libraries, Telecentres and Cybercafés: A Study of Public Access Venues Around the World | CIS. In Quebec. Available at: http://www.cis.washington.edu/2008/08/ifla-paper/ [Accessed January 12, 2009].
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