Information Ethics and its Implications for Library and Information Professionals: A Contemporary Analysis
Information ethics provides an ethical framework for the information professionals for carrying out various information related works like acquiring, storing, processing and using of information. This has become vitally important in modern times, which has been dubbed as ‘information age’, because of the central role played by information in the socio-economic development of world nations. This also poses unique challenges for the library and information professionals, because the emergence of an ICT-driven information society has made their job much more challenging than before. This article explores the key questions related to information ethics and, in the light of codes of ethics promoted by national and international information organizations, discusses how information professionals could discharge their duties in an ethical and morally justifiable manner. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/pp.v51i1-2.17677
Separate, Unequal, but More Autonomous: Technology, Equity and World Order in the Millennial Transition*
On the threshold of the millennial transition of the next 20–40 years, the human community is confronted with four alliterative crises which will reach a crescendo in the 1980s: energy, environment, employment, and equity. Breakdowns in capital- and energy-intensive systems are increasingly likely in the industrially advanced countries of the North and in the so-called modern sectors of Third World economies. As pressure on non-renewable resources and the environment grows, more and more effort is being made through organized R&D in the North to find technological solutions or fixes to these problems. The revolutionary advances occurring in micro-electronics and biotechnology can have dramatic impact on life-styles in the North and South, and on the global political economy. The key issues of the millennial transition, however, will not be technological but economic and political, revolving around the question of control over these technological innovations. Greater economic, political and technological integration of the world will draw the periphery nations of the Third World more tightly into a web of continuing dependence; and therefore selective disengagement of the South from the North emerges as a ‘lesser evil’ transitional strategy, while the South seeks to strengthen its own local problem-solving skills to grapple with the alliterative crises of the 1980s. In this effort, the South must use more extensively its own existing survival technology - indigenously based knowledge and skills which most people in the Third World live by today - in judicious combination with new advanced technologies from the North, if it can exercise reasonable control over the acquisition and utilization of those technologies.
LAND DEGRADATION IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD: ISSUES AND POLICY OPTIONS FOR 2020
Land degradation takes a number of forms, including depletion of soil nutrients, salinization, agrochemical pollution, soil erosion, vegetative degradation as a result of overgrazing, and the cutting of forests for farmland. All of these types of degradation cause a decline in the productive capacity of the land, reducing potential yields. Farmers may need to use more inputs such as fertilizer or manure in order to maintain yields, or they may temporarily or permanently abandon some plots. Degradation may also induce farmers to convert land to lower-value uses. For example, farmers may plant cassava, which demands few nutrients, instead of maize, or convert cropland to grazing land.