The e-Mexico Portal and Serendipitous Discovery

One of the biggest challenges to finding government-related information about Mexico is a general lack of such information online.  As I began pulling together my research and previous blog posts for my reflection paper, I continued to browse for sources.  Serendipitous discovery: I found the portal for the e-Mexico project I mentioned in this post. And happily, the portal is also available in English: http://www.e-mexico.gob.mx/. A search on the Spanish version of the site for "biblioteca" yielded a large number of results, ranging from a public health library to the congressional library (http://www.diputados.gob.mx/cedia/biblio/depleg_decre.htm.  The site is a gold mine of information, and I am now near the end of my research project!

The four primary "pillars" of the portal are e-Aprendizaje (Learning), e-Salud (Health), e-Economia (Commerce), and e-Gobierno (Government).  Some sections are divided by content focusing on specific groups, such as women, senior citizens, the poor, and so forth.  There is a page listing e-communities centered around shared interests: http://www.e-comunidades.gob.mx/, and links to related sites, such as INAFED, or E-local (http://www.e-local.gob.mx/), a site dedicated to making local government processes and information more transparent and available to the public. 

While I didn't find loads articles on the e-Mexico project in English in the literature, this site would be worthy of its own research project given its breadth and the many groups it is working to provide information to.

2nd Weekend of Class

It seemed like my group struggled a bit at the end to pull our project together into a single cohesive whole, but somehow we managed to create something that I'm really proud of.  The Languages presentation was really fascinating, and got me thinking about unwritten languages in a whole new way.  One statement that Kristen made that struck me was about folks trying to write down oral languages who were struggling with how to indicate tone in speaking.  They concluded that they didn't need to indicate tone, drawing a parallel to written languages which rely on context to help establish meaning.  I got a lot out of the digital preservation presentation, as this is an area that I've been hearing a lot about at KU, in both the Digital Initiatives and Collection Development departments, where preservation of born-digital and online subscribed content are huge priorities.  Overall, this was a really great weekend!

Teaching Information Skills

Clearly, there are fewer libraries in Mexico than in the U.S., and the information skills of students across Mexico varies greatly between rural and urban areas. Together with the fact that the U.S.-Mexico border is an area that draws workers from across Mexico to employment opportunities at “maquiladoras”, or factories, where technology is beginning to outstrip the skills and knowledge of the population, this is a prime opportunity for university libraries to make themselves invaluable to their institutions. After all, who provides better information use training than librarians? This is exactly the situation that the libraries at the University of Juarez took advantage of beginning in 1995, when librarians embarked on a journey towards a true faculty-librarian partnership that resulted in information skills training becoming part of the required university curriculum, and made the libraries a center for faculty support and development.

Lau (2001) describes the levels of training developed for librarians and staff, students, and faculty members. He also discusses the expansion of the libraries’ efforts to a national scale with hosting of national conferences on strategies in user education, and to an international scale with the provision of training in information literacy instruction to instructors from Mexico and South America.

Among the benefits librarians gained from their efforts is the fact that they gained faculty status, largely as a result of their teaching activities in the information skills program. The library department has evolved into the Academic Affairs Directorate of the university, leading to the further integration of information skills into teaching. The librarians are also well integrated into university committees, giving the libraries a voice across campus.

I know that academic libraries in the U.S. are working to partner librarians with faculty more seamlessly, and that there are also standalone information literacy and research skills courses offered by librarians. One idea that caught my attention in Lau’s article was that students coming to the University of Juarez are nudged to visit the library as one of their first activities on campus. Each student gets an induction card that they must have stamped at locations across campus. Their visit to the main library includes a video and one hour tour, which the students must do to receive a stamp and be eligible to register for classes. At KU, library tours are offered but certainly not mandatory, and there have been graduate students whose first visit to the library came once they began their graduate studies! Lots of information is accessible online, of course, but imagine how much more likely a student would be to return to the library once they’d received an initial welcome and orientation to the resources and services available to them.

Reference

Lau, J. (2001). Faculty-librarian collaboration: A Mexican experience. Reference Services Review, 29(2), 95-105.

Librarian Training in Mexico: 1970s

In 1973, Vilentchuk, in a paper written for the National Center of Scientific and Technological Information in Tel Aviv, Israel, lamented the state of library technologist training. She noted that of the 6000 people working in libraries in 1973, only about 500, or 8%, have had library training of any type. Of those 500, only about 50, or 10% (1% of the total), are considered qualified librarians. Of those in that group with Master’s degrees, most earned them at American universities. Vilentchuk goes on to lay out a proposal for a two-part curriculum designed to train first library “technician assistants”, and second, library “technicians”, those interested in continuing their education and becoming the equivalent of full librarians.

The interesting background provided in the report includes some background as to the current state of library science education, and of several efforts that had been tried but had yielded very poor results. One example (1973, p. 4) was a Master’s program at the National University of Mexico, which only graduated eight students in five years!

The Curriculum: Appendix A

Par t 1 of the curriculum assumes that students will need to begin working in a library before completing the entire program, so it focuses on the basic skills needed to run a library: cataloging, acquisition, and lending procedures; administration skills; and basic reference knowledge.

Part 2 focuses on the skills and knowledge needed in an academic or special library: subject expertise, including knowledge of publications and their use in answering subject-specific reference questions; familiarity with the theory and practice of indexing, complex cataloging, and classification; knowledge of reader services; and knowledge of the types of literature (primary, secondary, and tertiary).
I’m interested in following up further on this paper to see if any of it was ever put into practice, and if so, what the outcomes were.

Reference

Vilentchuk, L. (1973). Basic Training Programme for Library Technicians in Mexico. Report: ED077526. 38pp. Mar.

The National Public Libraries Program

Some bits and pieces from a previous post.

I found more information about the National Public Libraries Program initiated by President De La Madrid in 1983. In her article “The Economic Crisis and the Scientific, Technical and Cultural Information Services in Mexico”, Fernandez De Zamora discusses the rapid growth of libraries resulting from unprecedented support at all three levels of government (national, state and local). The program ended with successful completion of its mission to establish public libraries in every city of greater than 30,000 people, and library services for every city of fewer than 30,000 containing a secondary school. In five year, 2696 new libraries were created, bringing the total from 351 in 1983 to 3047 in 1988. At the same time, she notes that the economy was falling apart as oil prices fell, so the newly built libraries were immediately faced with the pressure of sharp budget cuts and currency devaluation that reduced the real value of salaries and the purchasing power for collections (1990).

We are currently facing tough economic times in the U.S., when budget cuts are leading to reductions in the services, resources, and instruction libraries have provided to their communities. Does this result in a downward spiral in overall information literacy among a populace that needs to be ready to run the nation’s schools, businesses and government? More people are making use of public libraries as they reduce their spending on books and media, and as they do more job research and hunting online at the library computers. What would take the place of the public library if a community decided the financial costs outweighed the community service benefits?

Reference

Fernández De Zamora, R. M. (1990). The economic crisis and the scientific, technical and cultural information services in Mexico. [doi: DOI: 10.1016/0020-7837(90)90026-C]. International Library Review, 22(4), 263-271.

E-Government and E-Commerce in Mexico

Following our discussion in class, I decided to focus on e-government for this post. In order to create an e-commerce friendly legal environment, the Mexican government took steps in the late 1990s to adapt existing laws related to e-commerce. Notably, in 1998, laws were introduced that allowed for electronic submission of tax returns. Other reforms included giving electronic documents, signatures, and written consents full legal recognition. The primary effort at making government services and information available electronically AND providing nationwide access to that information, “E-Mexico”, was initiated by President Vicente Fox’s administration with an implementation date of March 2001. Cortes explains that with the project,

“the government plans to implement a network with all regions of the country,…to help to modernize public administration. Therefore, it will allow access to information by all the population. This project objective is to implement by the year 2006 a national Network for the 2447 municipalities, in order to serve nearly 60 million Mexicans (2002; 6).”

The infrastructure has been growing over the past two decades, and Palacios makes the claim that along with a basic regulatory framework, “a reasonably adequate IT infrastructure exists in Mexico for e-commerce to take hold and develop in this country (2003, 73)”:

• The Internet in Mexico was born in 1987. Aside from the primary domain “.mx”, there were no subdomains until 1992. By 2001, there were nearly 74,000 subdomains, with the subdomain “com.mx” used by commercial users comprising over 67,000 of that total.
• The number of Internet users has increased from 39,000 in 1994 to over 2.7 million in 2000.
• Mobile phone use has grown from 64,000 in 1990 to 21.7 million in 2001.
• Mexico has the highest number of Internet hosts per 1,000 inhabitants in Latin America, at 4.16 in 1999.

Palacios, 2003, p. 74, Table 7

While there are domestic companies who have contributed to growing e-commerce in Mexico, one of the largest promoters has been Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Their efforts have included “providing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with digital technologies at low cost for engaging in e-commerce (Palacios, 74).” This is a substantial effort, given that within the services sector, which accounts for two-thirds of GDP, small businesses with 15 or fewer employees comprise 98% of all enterprises (Palacios, 72). That figure also provides an indicator for why e-commerce has not spread more quickly within Mexico, as smaller businesses tend to lack the resources to invest in information technology. As a side note, there are some people in Mexico who are concerned that the level of participation from Microsoft could lead to a national dependency upon that company (Cortes, 2002).

References

Cortes, J. (2002). New government of change in Mexico: a new information policy? Paper presented at the 68th IFLA Council and General Conference.

Palacios, J. J. (2003). The Development of E-Commerce in Mexico: A Business-Led Passing Boom or a Step Toward the Emergence of a Digital Economy? The Information Society: An International Journal, 19(1), 69 - 79.

Reflection on the weekend

It's been nice to work with my group in person, although hashing out our research question and figuring out how to divide up the work took much more time than I thought. And about halfway through our group discussion, I realized that I'd been trying to shoehorn my true interest (content and collections, specifically data harvesting initiatives and making content accessible) into our topic, which was supposed to be about how in the digital age, the blurring of institutional boundaries is both created by and impacts users. I would argue that the efforts to harvest data and present it globally on the Web fits into this topic well. Fortunately, we were able to narrow our scope significantly, and will be doing two case studies and a literature review about collaboration between various types of institutions, such as museums, libraries, archives, schools, and so forth.

I struggle in class with finding a way to voice my opinions without being offended by others in the class who may be quite opinionated. My concern is that if I don't speak up, my silence could be assumed to be agreement, which it may not be. Some of our discussion focused on whether the West is trying to project its values onto developing nations in seeking to design policy for bringing about knowledge societies. The materialism of the West was criticized as a product of capitalism, with capitalism as the culprit behind the current economic recession. I think that it's the freedom of expression and emphasis on human rights that allow for capitalism and democracy, and that both of these are the means for individuals to reach their full potential in a knowledge society.

I'm taking a class this spring with another Overland Park cohort, and I've found this cohort to be much friendlier and welcoming to non-cohort folks. It probably helps that this class is smaller, so discussion is more comfortable and less likely to be dominated by one or two people.

Libraries in Mexico

Efforts to create the National Library of Mexico (http://biblional.bibliog.unam.mx/bibn/) began in 1833, and it was finally formally established in 1867 through a decree issued by Benito Juarez following the overthrow of Emperor Maximilian. The Library has holdings of over 1,250,000 books and documents, and is a legal deposit library, "which provides for the obligation of editors and producers of bibliographic and documentary material, to deliver copies of their works to the National Library and the Library of Congress." (http://biblional.bibliog.unam.mx:8080/lenya/ibh/live/deposito-legal.html). (based on Spanish to English translation of the site using FoxLingo (http://www.foxlingo.com/).

The pathfinder at this location was created by Library of Congress subject specialists, and provides links to information about libraries, archives, digital collections and related organizations in Mexico, with links and brief descriptions:
http://www.loc.gov/rr/international/hispanic/mexico/resources/mexico-libraries.html

Cunningham, N. (1997) Texas Library Journal. 73(3) Fall 1997. “Global Reach: An interview with Mexican Library Association President Elsa Ramírez Leyva “. Retrieved from http://www.txla.org/pubs/tlj-3q97/article1.html on February 20, 2010.

This article is over ten years old, so I'm interested to follow up and see if and how the situation may have changed. I suspect, based on reading Gastelum's article below, that many of Leyva's points are still valid.

Excerpt: “‘In Mexico, public libraries are not very well supported by the government. We have had libraries from the 16th century, but even so, people are not used to looking to the library as a possible source of information.’
‘Public libraries only started in the last century as small libraries, called gabinetas de lectura, or reading rooms, but most of the collections were in English and French so they were only for the well-educated. In the 1920s, after the revolution, there was a group of intellectuals who worked for many things, including the public library. These were people who had been to the United States and had experienced public libraries. José Vasconcelos, Mexican philosopher and one-time Minister of Education, was one of these intellectuals who supported the idea of public libraries in Mexico.’
One of the problems, according to Ms. Ramírez, is that Mexican public libraries have not experienced a consistent level of support over the years. We know that this is also a challenge for Texas public libraries.
It wasn’t until 1983, under President Miguel de la Madrid, that Mexico began to develop a strong public library support program. Ms. Ramírez noted that ‘through this project they opened almost 3,000 public libraries across the country. Currently Mexico has 5,000 public libraries.’”

Meraz, G. (1998) Texas Library Journal. 74(4) Winter 1998. “Bookmarks, the Lawrence Brothers, and the Cuban Connection: TLA IN MEXICO.“ Retrieved from http://www.txla.org/pubs/tlj74_4/meraz.html on February 20, 2010.

Another slightly dated article about the struggle public libraries face in building their collections, and the impact that lack of reading material may have on the public those libraries are intended to serve.

Excerpt: “The prohibitive expense of books in general coupled with a struggling public library system make finding reading material a significant problem...For many, books are luxury items. Compounding the problem, public libraries in Mexico have virtually no money for collection development. Most consist of small collections in such poor condition that the materials are almost unusable. Of the roughly 6,000 libraries in Mexico, only a few hundred function, even in the most basic of terms, as proper libraries, confided a former member of the ministry of education. While universities and a few premier state-sponsored libraries do offer high caliber services and materials, the public remains generally isolated from that world of books. As the Argentinean reporter concluded, "without books to read, engendering a culture of reading becomes near impossible."

Gastelum, S. (2006) Criticas. Inside Mexican Libraries. Retrieved from http://www.criticasmagazine.com/article/CA6344733.html on February 17, 2010.

Criticas is a provider of Spanish-language book reviews, so I was interested to see an editorial here that offered a perspective on the current state of public libraries in Mexico. According to Gastelum, there are 7100 public libraries in Mexico, all of which are part of a network administered from Mexico City, called Red Nacional de Bibliotecas Públicas (RNBP). All funding for the libraries for everything except staff salaries comes from the government, with salaries paid by the local governments. A recent effort to create a “megalibrary” in Mexico City has been very controversial, not only because it has cost $100 million, but because critics claim that it centralizes control over public libraries even further.

“(Critics) have told the media that it is difficult to acknowledge the Vasconcelos library as an “electronic brain” for all libraries when most of them are literally falling apart. In 2000, only two out of every ten branches had web access. Today, only 30 percent of libraries have computers or Internet access. Ironically, on opening day, the megalibrary’s few computers had no keyboards and not all were wired to the Internet. So far, there is no strategic plan for how the new library in Mexico City will serve the branches.”

One-size-fits-all policy?

As a side note, something that I take issue with in the Van Audenhove article (source below) is that in discussing developing nations, rarely are the circumstances of any particular nation mentioned; rather, they are grouped together by continent, such as South America, Africa, and so forth. In his 2207 TED presentation on Gapminder, Hans Rosling uses visual displays of statistics to show vast differences between countries, such as between Mauritania and Uganda in Africa, noting that improvement of the world must be highly contextualized. Even within a country, differences among the population call for sensitivity to those differences, rather than calling for a single one-size-fits-all policy that governs development. I also wonder what must come first in the equation of development. Will information and communication technologies (ICTs) in fact bring the means to achieve prosperity, or are there some other more basic needs that must first be met before ICTs can fully take root?

Rosling, Hans (2007). Hans Rosling’s new insights on poverty. TED presentation, accessed from http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html, February 2, 2010.

Van Audenhove, L., Burgelman, J.C., Nulens, G., and Cammaerts, B. (1999). Information society policy in the developing world. Third World Quarterly, 20(2), 387-404.

Privatization of Telmex

Privatization and deregulation in the 1990s had a significant impact on the progress of basic infrastructure and information infrastructure development in Mexico.

Mexico’s public telephone company, Telmex, was privatized in 1990 with mixed results. There was no regulatory body put in place to oversee the telecommunications industry, however the IEG report notes that competition in the form of a growing number of private firms entering the industry has resulted in a sort of checks and balances system in which the companies must now keep rates low and customers satisfied or risk losing market share. This competition was delayed for six years after privatization through the granting of exclusive rights to Telmex for both domestic and international long-distance services. While the overall number of telephone lines added across the country expanded by 42% during the first three years following privatization, and both the government and investors had substantial earnings through tax revenues and stock increases respectively, service has remained poor. According to the IEG report, “in 1992, Telmex averaged a million customer complaints a month,” and “in the worst month of the 1993 rainy season, one in nine telephones was out of service.” The Global Information Technology report’s Infrastructure Environment section lists Mexico at 68 out of 134 with 18.54 telephone lines per 100 population, behind other South American countries such as Costa Rica, Argentina, and Brazil.

References

Independent Evaluation Group, The World Bank Group (2001). Privatization and Deregulation in Mexico. Accessed from http://lnweb90.worldbank.org/oed/oeddoclib.nsf/DocUNIDViewForJavaSearch/02BA59E41714B982852567F5005D8A07?opendocument, February 3, 2010.

The World Bank. World Development Report 2006: Equity and Development.
World Economic Forum.

The Global Information Technology Report 2008-2009. Accessed from http://www.insead.edu/v1/gitr/wef/main/fullreport/index.html, February 3, 2010.

Aspects to consider

Our opening discussion for the semester was to describe our concept of information infrastructure. One of my classmates, Magda, noted at the end of her post that

"National information infrastructure may vary due to local beliefs and customs; the level of freedom allowed citizens; and the economic conditions of the nation. On a global level, beliefs, customs, and laws can expedite or hinder the free flow of information."

As I examine information infrastructure in Mexico, I plan to keep this idea firmly in mind, although with perhaps a bit of a twist. I think that local beliefs and customs directly affect the level of freedom allowed to citizens. My premise is that the higher the level of freedom, the broader and stronger the information infrastructure, and therefore the freer the flow of information.

Why Mexico?

The objective of this blog project is to explore issues related to the information infrastructure of Mexico. There are multiple facets to information infrastructure, including how it has developed within Mexico and between Mexico and the rest of the global community, and how it has developed across Mexico, including disparities among the states and regions that constitute the nation.

Source: Mexico Cities [Map]. (2010). Retrieved from World Book Online Reference Center.

My particular interest in Mexico stems from my college experience, when I had an opportunity during my senior year to live and work for a semester in the central part of the country. The first six weeks were spent in Cuernavaca, living with a host family and attending language classes at Universal, http://www.universal-spanish.com/home.htm. The rest of the semester I lived in the village of Vicente Guerrero (http://www.traveljournals.net/explore/mexico/map/p6283177/vicente_guerrero.html), a community of about 600 people in the state of Tlaxcala. My internship was originally intended to focus on sustainable agriculture practices, but due to gender barriers I found myself involved with a group of women who were visiting other communities and teaching other women about health and traditional medicines. At the time I lived there (1995), the telecommunication infrastructure consisted of a single telephone in the village, and most people got their news through the radio. In Cuernavaca, the language school director’s office computer had internet access and an email account, but the primary mode of communication back to the US was via telephone and fax.

I look forward to investigating how information infrastructure has developed and progressed over the past 15 years, and what the major influences on that development have been.