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Content Professionals Bridge the Digital Divide
Among all the issues dealt with by the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), the digital divide is indisputably the most crucial one, because it affects billions of human beings. It separates the “haves” and “have-nots”, not only between industrialized countries and developing countries, but also within the national borders, in the North as well as in the South. The content professionals such as scientists, archivists, librarians and journalists living in the Least Developed Countries (LDC) are suffering immensely from this discrepancy which prevents them from taking advantage of the formidable opportunities created by the emerging Information Society. They rightly feel professionally marginalized and are de facto excluded from the international cooperation.
Based on this observation, the Swiss Commission for UNESCO (SCU) launched, in the last quarter of 2002, an ambitious pilot project entitled The Content Professionals Bridge the Digital Divide. To this end,
the SCU formed a partnership with four international professional organizations directly concerned with the issue, namely: |
