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Social Science Library:
Frontier Thinking in Sustainable Development and Human Well-Being

Update on the Social Science Library Project
The Social Science Library (SSL) project has achieved a major milestone on October, 1st 2008, with the shipment of 500 copies of the preliminary, single-CD version of the collection to our outreach and distribution partner, Winrock International.  Winrock's agents will be field testing the CD in Ghana and Nigeria.  User feedback will be used to refine the final, 2-CD version of this important collection of social science literature. 

The single-CD version of the SSL will also be distributed to approximately 50 participants from 38 countries at the November meeting of eFIL (Electronic Information for Libraries) in Sofia, Bulgaria.  eFIL is a not for profit organization that supports and advocates for the wide availability of electronic resources for libraries in transitional and developing countries. eFIL assists in building library consortia, provides support for the development of local digital resources and offers advisory and capacity building services in open access publishing, copyright and free and open source software for libraries.

As a contribution to the UN Decade for Education for Sustainable Development, GDAE is creating the Social Science Library: Frontier Thinking in Sustainable Development and Human Well-Being. The Social Science Library (SSL) collection will contain about 3,000 full text journal articles and book chapters in Anthropology, Economics, History, Philosophy, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science.  The Library will also include bibliographic references to approximately 9,000 articles, to give a broader sense of each subject covered.  The SSL will be available on CD-ROM and distributed, free of charge, to university libraries in 137 developing countries, with particular emphasis on those locations that are least likely to have good access to the Internet.  The selections, with a focus on sustainable development and human well-being, are being carefully organized to accomplish the following goals:

• To enable users to find material of interest quickly and efficiently
• To mimic a web search so as to assist scholars and students to make good use of the web when they do have access
• To give global attention and emphasis to those social science writings that are most likely to contribute to understanding and promotion of sustainability and human well-being.
• To assist scholars and thinkers in developing countries to participate fully in the on-going development of social science knowledge and understanding 

Social Science Library Advisory Board

Craig Calhoun
Kemal Dervis
Khadija Haq
Andrzej Kassenberg
Kumari Jayawardene
Wangari Maathai
Mary Robinson
Amartya K. Sen
Ismael Serageldin
Joseph Stiglitz
Paul P. Streeten

At IFLA
The Social Science Library was presented at the poster sessions of the World Library and Information Congress/74th International Federation of Library Associations General Conference and Council, August 10-14, 2008, in Quebec City, Canada.

Results of International Field Testing
In December, 2006 and January, 2007, 12 outreach associates demonstrated the Beta version of the SSL CD in 12 developing and emerging countries.  102 librarians, professors, and scholars were shown the SSL, receiving very positive reactions overall.  While our outreach associates encountered a few technical setbacks (running into firewalls, finding compressed files that wouldn’t open, not enough disk space to load the entire collection) they found that the SSL worked very well.  They confirmed our assumption that most personal computers used in academic libraries have Windows 98 or higher as their operating systems.  Since this means that most personal computers have Internet Explorer already installed, we won’t be including a web browser on the final SSL CD, leaving more room on the CD for content.

Thank you to everyone who participated in field testing the SSL.  Your time and comments are very much appreciated.

GDAE's Social Science Library Project featured in Tufts Daily Newspaper
In a feature article entitled "Books without borders give low-income libraries a major boost," The Tufts Daily chronicles the experience of the SSL's Outreach Associates. The full article can be read here.

SSL Outreach Associate, Maryna Vaschenko, currently a Ph.D. candidate at Tufts University, and Fullbright Ukraine alumna 2003-2006, presented the SSL to librarians at Fullbright Ukraine. Photos of the event can be found here.

Technical Overview
The SSL is being created with Greenstone open source software and Cvision compression software.  The user has the option to install the collection on the computer’s hard drive or to run it from the CD.  System requirements are Windows 95 or greater operating system, and 64 MG of RAM. Using the collection requires an Internet browser and Adobe Reader application software, both of which will be included on the CD.

For more information about the SSL, e-mail us at SSL@tufts.edu

137 SOCIAL  SCIENCE  LIBRARY
RECIPIENT  COUNTRIES
By Region
10/19/2007
(Threshold US$ 6,000 GNI per capita 2005)

Source: WDI database.  Accessed January 19, 2007 from http://devdata.worldbank.org/dataonline.  Accessed August 15, 2007 from http://ddp-ext.worldbank.org.

Note: Countries in our list have a gross national income (GNI) of less than $6,000/capita, as determined by the Atlas method in the World Bank World Development Indicators (WDI) database 2005.  Mexico and Lebanon have a GNI/capita above $6,000, but have been included in the list above, because of their poor Internet access [Mexico has a GNI/capita = $7,310 and Internet users/1000 people = 118; while Lebanon has a GNI/capita = $6,180 and Internet users/1000 people = 114)].  In addition, the following countries have been withdrawn from our SSL recipient country list as our GNI/capita threshold was cut from $11,000 to $6,000 (in descending order of relative wealth): Barbados; Antigua and Barbuda; Trinidad and Tobago; Seychelles; St. Kitts and Nevis; Croatia; Slovak Republic; Palau; Poland; Lithuania; Latvia; and Chile. 

Our image documents will be easier to download due to compression Software provided by our friends at CVISION Technologies.