No. 1 January 2003

A positive and progressive New Year to you all from all of us at the Caribbean Documentation Centre and the Caribbean Digital Library. 2002 was a fairly encouraging year for the CDL We believe however, that 2003 can be a truly impressive year if we get input and participation from all concerned. We intend to use the medium of this Quarterly Update to keep you apprized of the progress of the CDL.

But first, a reminder of what the Caribbean Digital Library is attempting to achieve. It is trying to create an organized collection of substantive documents and other web-based resources of relevance to Caribbean Development issues. At the May 2000 meeting which launched the CDL, persons attending held an ambitious vision of what they wanted the service to become:

The Caribbean Digital Library will be recognized as the primary, authoritative, web-based source of intellectual works in, for and about the Caribbean

You will judge for yourselves whether we have made sufficient progress towards this ambitious goal.

The statistical analysis which follows will alert you to subject as well as geographical gaps in the service and hopefully prompt you to add documents from your own institution, from your own country, as well as other relevant web resources of which you might be aware.

Digital or Virtual and does it really matter?

There has been some discussion as to whether the Caribbean Digital Library is a truly digital library or merely a virtual one. Indeed it is both. It is "virtual" since it appears to bring together a set of documents that have no geographical proximity. There is no single host for the documents listed. The CDL merely provides links to the URLs where the documents can be found. However, the Library is also "digital" since it consists entirely of electronic files - or documents in digital format,,.

The Digital Library Federation of the United States offers the following definition:

Digital libraries are organizations that provide the resources, including the specialized staff, to select, structure, offer intellectual access to, interpret, distribute, preserve the integrity of, and ensure the persistence over time of collections of digital works so that they are readily and economically available for use by a defined community or set of communities.

We are guided by this definition and adhere to most of its requirements. We cannot "ensure the persistence over time" of every document listed but we can and do preserve the integrity of the collection by checking the links periodically and removing those that are persistently inactive.

Does it really matter, the difference between digital and virtual? We think that it does. As a group of professionals whose work is now being played out on a world wide stage, we need to be visibly au fait with the language and culture of the new technology. And we are! Of even greater importance however, is the fact that we are doing a service for the Caribbean region that we as librarians are uniquely qualified and equipped to do. And it is a service to which we need to make a commitment if we are to do it well.

Subject Headings

As at December 31^st 2002, the Caribbean Digital Library provided links to 458 web-based documents arranged under broad subject headings:. Six new headings were added in December 2002. These are easily identifiable by the zeros in the table below since no documents have been added under the new headings so far. We will also change the subject headings for some old items in cases where a more appropriate subject heading has been made available. For example, several items now listed under "Government and Public Administration" will soon be identified with the subject tag "Politics". By the time this is read it is likely that the number of documents available under each heading would have increased as we continue to add to the collection.

The Role of the Caribbean Digital Library Consortium

An article in the April to June issue of the newsletter: "Focus: ECLAC/CDCC in the Caribbean" has commented on the Caribbean Digital Library in this way:

"The existence of the CDL has improved access to information on Caribbean Development. Its sustainability, however may be threatened by under-participation. The Caribbean Digital Lbrary Consortium was conceived as a successor arrangement to the Caribbean Information System for Economic and Social Development (Carisplan). That collaboration, formed in the mid 1980s, had envisioned cooperation among documentation centres in the Caribbean to catalogue the published and unpublished development documents within the subregion. The result was a computer-based union catalogue of subregional development information. The primary intent in the creation of the CDL was to replace this bibliographic catalogue with a full text library of even wider scope.

Equally important, the CDL Consortium was envisioned as not only a major source of content but also as a cadre of active contributors. The reality is however that the ECLAC Subregional Headquarters for the Caribbean, ... continues to be the primary source of input. Such low participation threatens to inhibit the pace at which the CDL will grow. A harvest of just over 400 documents after two years of effort is substantially below the 1000 anticipated for this period. While the ECLAC Subregional Headquarters is encouraged by CDL usage, it cannot avoid speculating about how much more impressive the statistics would have been if the content were more in line with initial projections."

Yes, the Consortium was envisioned as a cadre of active contributors. In 2003 we will make every effort to ensure that this aspect of the vision is translated into reality.

On a positive note, we welcome the ADEK University Libraries in Suriname to the Caribbean Digital Library Consortium. The input from ADEK is largely responsible for most of the documents from Suriname. Mrs Jane W. F. Smith, Director of the ADEK Libraries is the contact person there.

The Centre for Gender and Development Studies of the University of the West Indies has also recently expressed an itnerest in adding some of their documents to the CDL.

Persons and institutions interested in joining the CDL Consortium should indicate their interest by writing Sandra John, Chief, Caribbean Documentation Centre, United Nations ECLAC at the following address: sjohn@eclacpos.org No membership fees are applicable at the moment, but this could change when more formal structures are put in place.

Distribution of Documents by Country

The table below gives a rough indication of the geographic distribution of documents in the CDL.

Usage of the CDL

The use of the CDL is reflected in the figures below. Note the dramatic falling off in usage in November and December 2002. This was caused by a new development. The ECLAC website on which the CDL is posted is now hosted by the ECLAC Headquarters in Santiago. As a consequence there was a change in address from the simple www.eclacpos.org/cdl to something much more difficult to remember. Persons searching for the CDL could not find it and assumed that there were technical problems. A link from the original site name to the new address was eventually established and it is hoped that the usage will once again show a positive trend.

Caribbean Documentation Centre

January 2003