SystemWatch:
‘DHL’: Rising to the Challenge
By John A. Aarons

Just 15 years ago, the Dag Hammarskjöld Library depended upon traditional, essentially localized, reader services including reference volumes and card indexes. Much has changed since, as Dr. Aarons notes in this contribution.

The assumption can be made that the late Dag Hammarskjöld would have agreed with the clause in the Millennium resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 8 September 2000 [Millennium Summit Declaration, A/RES/55/2] which pledged the United Nations to “ensure that the benefits of new technologies, especially information and communication technologies ... are available to all”. This resolution is important as it has now been generally accepted that information and communications technologies (ICTs) have important roles to play in improving the level of living and the quality of life of people, especially those in the developing countries of the world where the challenge of using ICTs effectively is greatest.

This task has now become urgent as the advent of the information superhighway and the subsequent rapid increase in the availability of information has resulted in further division between rich and poor countries. As noted by the United Nations Development Programme’s Sustainable Development Networking Programme for Jamaica: “The fast growth of the Internet has given a crucial alarm signal to developing countries: the existing information gap will grow even more unless they launch the process that will give affordable access to all key sectors of society to the World Wide Web”. Reducing the “digital divide” has therefore become a crucial item on the agenda of national governments and international organizations.

Libraries should be seen as central to digital divide solutions because, as the American Library Association has said, the “digital divide is not just about access to a computer. Libraries have worked to bridge the divide between the information ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ for more than a hundred years”. Libraries are therefore ideally placed to harness the new technology to provide faster and more effective access to information. “Our time has come”, asserted Ross Shimmon, Secretary-General of the International Federation of Library and Institutions (IFLA), “but only if we grasp the challenge.”

The Dag Hammarskjold Library (DHL) has certainly risen to the challenge, and as the lead library in the United Nations system it is using modern tools of information and communications technology in order to connect the public to sources of information in the entire UN system. In May 2000, Anwarul Chowdhury of Bangladesh, supporting Nigeria’s statement on behalf of the Group of 77 and China, noted with satisfaction, in a meeting of the Committee on Information that “the Dag Hammarskjold Library was gradually becoming a virtual library with world outreach, making United Nations information and other acquired materials electronically accessible to a growing number of users”. The Library was therefore having a direct impact on the lives of countless people all around the world.

The late Dag Hammarskjold had a vision of a library in a building of “the highest quality, aesthetically designed, furnished, and equipped in conformity with the most modern library standards”, playing a prominent role in the affairs of the United Nations. He therefore would have approved of the enhanced role of the Library in information retrieval and dissemination in the electronic environment. As the United Nations is a major publisher of materials, the dissemination of information contained in these materials has been a major focus of the Library. Bibliographic control of the documents and publications produced by the Organization from its worldwide locations has always been a function of the Library. The United Nations Bibliographic Information System (UNBIS), the primary bibliographic database of UN material, was established in 1979 and offers access to the documentary output of the UN and to non-UN publications acquired by the DHL. Originally, it was only available online to the Secretariat staff, Missions to the UN, foreign Governments and depository libraries. Now it is freely available on the Internet. As it is comprised of full texts of documents, speeches, resolutions, etc., it has revolutionized the availability of these materials.

Although the primary purpose of the Library was - and still is - to serve the information needs of the staff of the Secretariat and those of the Permanent Missions, it had from its very beginnings a strong outreach programme in the depository libraries programme. This programme has grown that today there are 407 depository libraries in 145 countries, most in developing countries and usually sited in a national or university library. However, the composition and effectiveness of the depository libraries have changed over the years. Whereas these libraries can - and many still do - receive materials in the traditional printed format, the DHL has produced full-text CD-ROMS of its holdings, and these are available in depository and field libraries all over the world.

The process of dissemination of UN documentary materials has been greatly assisted by the establishment and development of the DHL Web site, which contains the Library’s bibliographic catalogue, along with full-text databases of UN documents, etc. The Library has also produced a thesaurus to the UNBIS, which is multidisciplinary in scope. The electronic version of this thesaurus (4th edition) is the first edition to be available in all six official languages of the United Nations. Its publication is significant as it contains the terms used in subject analysis of documents and other materials relevant to the UN activities. The Web site has also allowed the Library to expand its role to provide information of a general nature, such as listings of UN conferences and observances, and information on a variety of topics such as flags and maps. An important feature of the site is that it is accessible in all the official languages. This multilingual approach by the Library has increased its ability to make information more readily available than was previously possible when information was restricted to languages such as English and French. In 1999, the Library's Web site received 1.5 million ‘hits’ [Report of the Committee on Information, A/55/21].

In 1998, the Library pioneered the establishment of the United Nations Consortium for sharing the cost of site licenses for external online information services. In 2000, this Consortium had 37 members and offers products from 13 vendors. As the DHL moves towards being a “virtual library”, information no longer has to reside within its walls but can be obtained easily when required. The advent of the Internet also has meant that all the libraries in the United Nations system can be networked and all the resources of the UN accessed at any point. This is the objective of the United Nations System Shared Cataloguing and Public Access System (UNCAPS). This site, which is coordinated by the DHL, provides a single point of access to library catalogues, indexes and abstract databases, library holdings, link to full text resources and archives.

However, the Library must be concerned that the Internet is only available to a small percentage of the world's population. Increasing access to the Internet should be an objective of the DHL as it seeks to disseminate information as widely as possible. One of the ways it is doing this is by increasing the capability of the depository and field libraries to access this information to assist their users. Training is an important component of this. In 2000, in cooperation with UN information centres and services, the Library organized four regional workshops for depository librarians in developing countries. Emphasis was placed on hands-on training in the use of UN resources on the Internet. A priority of the DHL should be to ensure that these libraries have a reliable and reasonable priced connection to the Internet. Using the Union Catalogue (UNCAT), they could gain access to the main collections of the UN and download materials as required and not have to maintain a print collection of these materials.

The DHL, in 1999, initiated an interactive technical assistance programme to support small and field libraries and help them to upgrade their services. It has designed a database entitled SMLCAT for Small and Field Libraries, and instructions for its use is available on its Web site. This programme should be very useful to libraries with limited professional staff in the developing countries as it is intended to promote resource sharing among UN libraries and avoid duplication of work. As a result, the DHL recommends that bibliographic tools developed by it be used to identify and retrieve all UN material.

The DHL has not only kept pace with modern technological developments, but it has launched its own initiatives to provide greater public awareness of its collections, as well as those of other libraries in the United Nations network. In doing this, it has not lost sight of its core responsibility of providing information to its users, as in 2000/2001 it responded to 60,000 individual reference requests. As a result of the digitization of documents and the creation of resource databases, large quantities of information within the Library are now easily accessible by persons all over the world [Annual Report of the Secretary-General, A/56/1]. By making information available to persons in their own language, the DHL is playing its role in helping to bridge the information gap between developed and developing countries.

Links:
Dag Hammarskjöld Library

John A. Aarons is Executive Director of the National Library of Jamaica and made the presentation, from which this is excerpted, at the symposium on the 40th anniversary of the Dag Hammarskjöld Library on 1 March 2002.