Newsletter of the Supercourse (4)
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Regina Shakakata wrote:
>
> The news about the possibility of having Nature/JAMA free on the In-
> ternet to developing countries is very pleasing indeed. I am a li-
> brarian from a developing country and I find the news most exciting.
> Please tell us the possible beneficiaries and whether that will in-
> clude medical libraries/individual health care workers/health insti-
> tutions? We look forward to the fruition of the initiative.
This would indeed be wonderful. 'Nature' is held in extremely high re-
gard by my patrons and its subscription would probably one of the last
to go. Me too will be interested to hear who will be the beneficiaries.
We in South Africa often have the problem that this country is consid-
ered to be "well-off". This is often taken from economic indicators
like the Gross National Product and we are indeed not scoring bad. The
problem is that this reflects the general, private sector economy and
does not take into account the financial position of individual insti-
tutions. We ourselves had a severe cutback on our parliamentary alloca-
tion, which make purchases difficult indeed. We were refused an infor-
mation product in the agricultural field due to our GNP being too high.
David Swanepoel
Library Information Service,
ARC-Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute
P Bag X05, Onderstepoort 0110
South Africa
Tel: +27-12-529-9279
Fax: +27-12-529-9282 / 565-6573
Cellular phone: +27-82-850-3170
mailto:david@moon.ovi.ac.za
http://www.ovi.ac.za/docs/homepage/david
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