Information in support of population activities.

Date:
1974
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Information in support of population activities. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    18/88 (page 16)
    Information in support of population activities all into account. The fact that much important population material appears only in fugitive or unpublished form adds to the difficulty. Distinctly different kinds of information are both needed and produced by the efforts of people engaged in action programmes (from administrators of national family planning programmes to local block workers and contraceptive counsellors) and the efforts of people engaged in research (from biomedical research in human reproduction to research in family structures, infant mortality, acceptance of contraceptive methods, migration, etc.). ^Population activities', being so various in themselves, take place in a wide variety of settings and situations. Many different kinds of workers need many different kinds of information, from a multitude of sources, for a multitude of applications. To serve the needs of all potential users, a population library must be run by a master of many trades, with sophisticated information handling techniques at his command. Until recently, a lack of financial support for the population field meant a corresponding lack of support solving the information needs of the field, and the undeniably low status of librarians in many areas of the world added further to the difficulties of population library work. The basic tools of the trade have also been lacking and, despite many early efforts on the part of innovative librarians to provide these tools, it is only recently that the population field itself, and with it the population library field, have become sufficiently co-ordinated for these efforts to bear significant fruit. Inter-library communication The Association for Population!Family Planning Libraries and Information Centers (APLIC) A fundamental need of the population library field has been for vehicles of commu¬ nication among librarians at all stages of accomplishment. A very preliminary step toward achieving this communication within the United States was taken in April 1968, when the first meeting of a group which was to become the Association for Population/Family Planning Libraries and Information Centers, International (APLIC), was convened at the Carolina Population Center (CPC) in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (United States). APLIC sees its role as one of providing a meeting place and forum for descrip¬ tion and discussion of new approaches to practical problems of collection, organization and maintenance, consideration of the future directions of the population field in their bearing on information needs and, not least important, personal communication and exchange among population librarians and informa¬ tion specialists. Also, whether one speaks of it as a cause or as a result, APLIC has been a vital part of a growing desire for a professional identity and status among population librarians, whose efforts, all too often, have not been recognized and supported by the organizations within which they work. This is an impediment encountered by librarians in many disciplines, but it is particularly disappointing to encounter it in a new quasi-scientific field with enormous information needs and problems. The existence of a professional organization for population libra¬ rians is affecting this situation for the better, a function which APLIC has implicity encouraged in recent years by holding its annual conferences in conjunction with the annual meetings of the Population Association of America which are attended