Networking at the end of the earth

Petropavlovsk, Kamchatka, one of the least known districts of one of Russia's least known regions, the Russian Far East, was the seemingly unlikely but truly appropriate host city for a conference on information services for culturally isolated populations. Sponsored by the Russian Ministry of Culture, the congress provided a look at a phenomenon largely unnoticed by citizens of more temperate climates-namely, the buzz of network-building across the Russian, Alaskan and Canadian tundra. East-West contacts through the Northern Pacific have many historical precedents: during the Crimean War in the 1850s, American ships ran the British blockade to supply Russian Far East settlements; at the beginning of this century, Vladivostok was a booming port of entry for American farm machinery of all kinds; and from 1918 to 1920, some 9000 American troops were dispatched to the Russian Far East to protect American interests threatened by the collapse of Czarist rule.

But after Soviet rule stabilized, the Russian Far East became the country's most "closed" region to foreigners. One reason for this was that it was the region closest to both the United States and Japan and was viewed by Soviet leaders as particularly vulnerable to capitalist and imperialist encroachments. In addition, under Stalin rule the mineral-rich Kolyma region in the northern Russian Far East was the site of the country's most notorious slavelabor camp, in whose mines hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of men and women perished before 1953.

The Kamchatka peninsula, the site of the recent conference, remained closed, even to most Russians, until 1991. This region of eerie and frenetic geothermal activity, with 29 active volcanoes, is the home to an important naval base whose strategic military personnel are among the 300,000 inhabitants of the main city, Petropavlovsk. Until after the fall of the Soviet Union, no Americans were permitted to even set foot on this peninsula.

But since then, a variety of contacts have been established across national boundaries in the sub-arctic regions, a number of which are information networks. The recent conference was called specifically to encourage increased development of local information services. Those of us from outside the region were impressed by how much has already been done, both locally by the Russians and internationally by various interested groups, including the related indigenous minorities of Alaska and the Northern Terntories of Canada.

ASIS member Adele Fasick of the University of Toronto spoke at the meeting of the artificial constraints imposed by sovereign nations on the traditional information systems of the Northern indigenous people: from Greenland across Northern Canada to Alaska and the Russian Far East, the Inuit peoples are bound by their common language-Inuktitut. But it is transcribed in two different alphabets-Roman in Greenland and Alaska and Cyrillic in Russia-and in a specially devised syllabary in Canada, severely limiting the Inuits' access torecords of their own common culture.

An ethnically diverse group of Russian regional librarians described local efforts to connect indigenous populations to the greater world of information. One colorful example of the situation faced in these isolated areas is provided by the title of Tatiana Kosygina's report, Library Services to the Reindeer Herders in the Koryak Autonomous District, located north of Kamchatka.

The conference reminds many of us less-isolated people just how much can be accomplished with minimum technology, if information professionals have the energy to cope with ice-bound bookmobiles, underheated regional information centers and 10-month winters. We learned of excellent regional library collections served by professional personnel in such locations as Yakutsk, Magadan, Petropavlovsk, Khabarovsk and Vladivostok.

High technology is gradually coming to Russian Far Eastern regional information centers, some of it with American help. The U.S. Information Agency has helped install the Internet at a number of Russian libraries. Right now, at least three libraries in the Russian Far East are on the Internet, although the catalogs of these libraries themselves are not yet automated. But again, help is on the way. Paul Maccarthy, emeritus director of the University of Alaska Library in Fairbanks, has initiated a project to enter the most important titles of the libraries in Khabarovsk, Petropavlovsk and Vladivostok on a CDROM called Polarpak.

The sheer vastness of the Russian Far East with its five time zones makes it one of the world's most interesting potential information technology markets. Up until very recently, the area's information network has been served by district libraries chained to the staterun press and book distributors, unreliable telephone and postal systems and the willingness of Russian professionals to travel enormous distances under grueling conditions. (One example of the expectations placed on library professionals is that the region's only library school-at Khabarovskoffers a distance education program based on the mail system and the travel of the faculty members to a population spread over 2.5 million square miles.)

The combined Soviet legacy of a literate population and a dense infrastructure of well-educated information professionals means the introduction of online communication could open public access to huge stores of information very quickly. Right now, tens of thousands of Russia's Far Eastern population live too far from information centers to receive anything but skeletal service, despite the dedication of Russian librarians; the area's average population density is, after all, less than one person per square kilometer! When and if the general population begins to profit from the area's incalculably valuable natural resources, currently fattening only a tiny group, the Russian Far East will offer an attractive and fastyielding investment opportunity for information technology of all kinds. The human network is already up and running.

Pamela Spence Richards is a professor at Rutgers University and chair-elect of SIG/III.

Copyright American Society for Information Science Dec 1995/Jan 1996
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved