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.

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    Information in support of population activities The special interests and problems of population libraries are treated in more currency and detail than are possible in a directory format through Over¬ view's 'Spotlight on ... * series. 'Spotlighted' so far have been: the Research and Reference Library on Population and Family Planning of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, Manila (Gelasio Y. Anglo, Librarian) ; the library of the East-West Population Institute, Honolulu (Alice D. Harris, Librarian); the Library of the International Institute for Population Studies, Bombay (Sarah Abraham, Librarian) ; the Giorgio Mortara Library of the Centro Latino-ameri¬ cano de Demografia (CELADE), Santiago (Chile) (Maria Cristina Sateler, Librarian) ; the IPPF Headquarters Library, London (Jacqueline Forget, Acting Head, Library and Documentation Service) ; the Library of the Korean Institute for Family Planning (KIFP), Seoul (J. 1. Kim, Librarian); and the Library of the National Institute for Family Planning, New Delhi (M. M. L. Goyal Libra¬ rian). News of such libraries and developments in both the population and popu¬ lation library fields in general are a major concern of the journal, which regularly contains lengthy reports by its area correspondents. Practical and day-to-day aspects of library development are treated in articles such as 'Aquisitions work for population libraries in Southeast Asia', by S. C. Dhir, Librarian of the WHO Regional Office for South-East Asia in New Delhi, and 'Edge-notched cards: an alternative to total automation', by Dan Joldersma, Librarian of the Department of Population Planning, University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Photographs and other illustrations greatly enhance the value of this type of article. An enthusiastically received feature in early issues was a listing of 'Free period¬ icals and their publishers'; new free materials are continually brought to the attention of readers in announcements and in the 'Materials exchange' column. A column entitled 'Skills and tools' answers readers' questions about technical aspects of library development. Several new features are planned; abstracts of articles appearing in Overview will be given in French and Spanish, and articles in library science journals which are relevant to population librarianship will be noted. More theoretical aspects of the population library field are presented in feature articles such as the report of the 1973 Regional Seminar on Information Storage, Retrieval and Dissemination organized by the Asian Mass Communication Research and Information Centre (AMIC) with the National Research Council of Thailand. The seminar dealt with general problems of documentation in Asia; the needs of information users; the acquisition, organization and dissemination of materials; and prospects for co-operation in these activities. The following quotation from the report sums up the general focus of the seminar: 'The contri¬ bution which documentation centres can play in national development has still to be recognized; where recognized it has still to be realized.' Bangkok meetings The very real problems that Overview had brought to light and the enthusiastic response of population librarians in coping with them, encouraged TIS to hold an Asian conference in joint sponsorship with the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) and with assistance from APLIC in September 1973 in Bangkok. The first meeting of the conference, an eight-day Population Library Development Institute, brought together forty- 18
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