When Co-Director of the Tufts Global Development and Environmental Institute (GDAE) Neva Goodwin first visited one of the top social sciences libraries in Buenos Aires, her heart fell. The collection of books there barely rivaled that on the crumbling wall shelves in the cramped attic of GDAE's Teele Ave. headquarters.
Though the scene Goodwin witnessed is common at universities in poorer countries, GDAE has worked for the past three years to create a new option for under-funded libraries like the one in Buenos Aires. Over winter break, GDAE sent almost 20 students to libraries across Asia, the Americas, Eastern Europe and Africa to test out a beta version of its Social Science Library (SSL), a searchable CD-ROM containing over 4,000 cutting-edge academic articles on the social sciences.
By the summer of 2007, GDAE plans to provide the SSL free of charge to "every university library in the third world," Goodwin said.
"We don't want to just get the best-known libraries in the big cities where they don't need it so badly; our real goal is to reach to the rural, underserved libraries," Goodwin said. "For many libraries, this would multiply what they have by 50 or 100, and it's something that faculty and students can carry in their pocket."
The beta CD, which currently contains just several hundred of the articles Goodwin hopes to include, was created to test a powerful internal search engine GDAE has built using open-source software that is freely available online. According to SSL Project Coordinator Suzanne Bremer, this type of software has kept the project's cost reasonable, and has huge implications for the developing world.
"Sorry Bill Gates," she said. "You don't make a dime."
The software involves complicated searching mechanisms, which separate articles into fields and subfields that allow for very specific searches.
GDAE enlisted 18 students as outreach associates to test the beta CDs on computers at universities in low-income regions during winter break. While they were there, the outreach associates introduced the program to librarians and university officials and gauged their interest.
Maryna Vashchenko, a graduate student in child development, traveled to universities near her home in Ukraine. According to her, the response was very positive.
"Everyone seems interested, and I felt like people considered themselves special in a way, because Tufts reached out and came to their doors," she said. "I felt like they were really grateful."
Vashchenko said the libraries in Ukraine are functional, but lack up-to-date information.
"Today, if you don't have the money, you don't have access to the most current and advanced knowledge," she said. "So I thought this was something I could probably contribute to my own country."
Sophomore Junaid Hashim showed the CD to several universities outside of his hometown of Bangkok, Thailand.
"I'd say about 50 percent of the universities I visited weren't in dire need of this kind of resource, but understood the importance of it, and were willing to spread it to the people who need it," Hashim said. "The other half were really excited to get it and to use it in their own institution."
"Funding is an issue, because it's free," he added. "Otherwise, it's sometimes difficult for the universities to get access to these kinds of articles."
Sophomore Charles Wartemberg, who showed the CD at universities in Ghana, faced a similarly enthusiastic response.
"They were very, very excited. They wanted to show it to everyone - their relatives, their brothers, their other friends at other institutions," he said. "They were pretty excited, and they all loved the idea that it was free."
According to Goodwin, the SSL project began in 2004 as an offshoot of the six-book series, "Frontier Issues in Economic Thought," which she edited from 1995 to 2001. The six anthologies include 400 detailed summaries of important articles in various social science fields. Goodwin said these books were the stepping-stones from which the SSL originated.
"All of these articles are about immensely important topics that we felt weren't getting enough attention in economics," Goodwin said. "We kept getting requests from people in the third world saying 'This series is what we need. This is a whole library in itself, and we only have a few books in the social science area of our library. Can you please send us the six books?'"
Realizing that shipping heavy and expensive books to rural libraries was financially impossible, Goodwin applied for a grant from the Ford Foundation to put the books' articles onto CDs and ship them to the libraries that were requesting articles. The foundation's response, she said, was surprising.
"They said 'You haven't asked for enough money,' which is not a very common response from a foundation," Goodwin said. "They gave us twice what we asked for, but they said, 'Think bigger.'"
Goodwin and her colleagues took the foundation's advice, and the SSL project in its current form - with a goal of 10 times as many articles as the book series would have included - was the result. Now, three years into the project, they are trying to overcome their first bumps in the road.
"We're aiming for 4,000 titles, but we haven't reached that yet because we're having trouble with publisher permissions," Goodwin said. "We're certainly over 1,000, and we've selected about 6,000 possibilities."
While the small academic presses have been very accommodating, Bremer said, they have had problems with corporate owners.
"There's been a major consolidation in the publishing industry, so you have a few major academic publishers controlling the copyrights for a huge portion of the publishing community," she said. "It's been much harder getting the okay from them."
Since the target universities are all abroad, they have also struggled to overcome the language barrier by targeting the CDs to students and professors who speak English and will be able to use them.
"Unfortunately not everyone speaks English, and the language of the articles is academic, so I don't see everybody being equally excited about getting access to the articles since they don't all know the language well," Vashchenko said. "But the people that do, if they use it in their academic work, [can] spread these concepts throughout the whole country."
Goodwin said the SSL will be a huge step for most of the universities that will receive it.
"I and some of my colleagues have visited libraries in universities in the third world, and have found the social science section to be in desperate need of more materials," she said, recalling a library in Africa with just one small shelf of social science books.
In these low-income areas, poor funding and economic censorship have severely limited the knowledge students have available.
"There's a filter," she said. "They're very poor, their means of communicating with the world outside is not very good, and what gets through that is things that somebody wanted to pay for."
"That somebody is usually either very avid free-marketers who want to sell the Western capitalist system, or else it's Marxists," she added. "They have the old Cold War approaches represented in these libraries."
At the same time, Goodwin said, she admits that the SSL has an ideology of its own. According to her, though, that ideology is a caring one.
"Economics pretends not to have goals, but in fact it does, and the goal is usually some version of increasing GIP or GDP, but in fact, GDP is only valuable insofar as it contributes to human well-being," she said. "The CD does not pretend to be value-free - I don't believe any social sciences are value-free. We care about sustainability, which means we care about the environment. We care about well-being, which means there might be some things more important than growth in production."
"That's our slant," she continued. "And I don't think many people will say those are unacceptable points of view."
