As of 22 April 2009 this website is 'frozen' in time — see the current IFLA websites
This old website and all of its content will stay on as archive – http://archive.ifla.org
These aims are still valid today and the OECD's mission remains to promote economic growth and development in Member and non-Member countries, and to contribute to an open international trade and investment system. These aims are achieved through co-operative effort on the part of the Member countries. The purpose of this paper is to describe the OECD both as information provider and as information consumer. The organisation provides information to researchers through its archives, statistics and publications. It uses information from many sources including that provided by the Central Library and the Library Intranet pages.
Energy statistics provided by the International Energy Agency are available in graphic form. Of particular interest are the "Energy Indicators" which show figures for energy production, imports, CO2 emissions, electricity consumption and population. (6)
The majority of these documents are working papers and general distribution papers. These latter, as the name implies, are freely available to any researcher who finds them of interest. The general distribution documents have a code e.g. OCDE/GD(97)123 where the figure in brackets identifies the year of publication. These publications are generally available in Portable Document Format (PDF) format.
As well as these publications mentioned above, there are regular updates of information put onto the OECD Internet. The page Financial Market Trends Highlights (14) presents a résumé of recent developments in international and national financial markets. These short articles are supplemented with tables in PDF format.
The Uncover profiles also allow our clients to receive Tables of Contents by e-mail. They then contact the Library if they wish to see the full-text of any of these articles. If we subscribe to the journal and we have a copy available, we will either lend the issue or provide a photocopy. If not, depending on the urgency of the request, we will obtain the article by inter-library-loan or order it from a document delivery service. As is the case with all libraries, we have to balance the speed of the service against cost.
The full-text of periodical articles is either downloaded from the Internet if it is available in PDF format or a link is established if it is in HTML format. The page of articles on digital money, which is part of the Library's file on electronic commerce, contains the full-text of a working paper from the Bank for International Settlements. The page of article references on government policy contains links to the two papers "Towards a European Framework for Digital Signatures & Encryption" and "A Framework for Global Electronic Commerce" as these two have been loaded onto the Internet in HTML format by the European Commission and the White House respectively.
As useful WWW sites are discovered they are added to the files. The WWW links page of the file "Corporate Governance" has as its first entry a link to the leading Internet site on the subject (19). As this subject is fairly hot at the moment, it is not surprising to find a fair number of principal sites dealing with corporate governance including the OECD's own site. (20)
The links to government or country-specific sites are listed alphabetically. One example of a country's or region's web page is the page "Hong Kong World Wide Web Database". (21) As well as this page created by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, there is an official HK government page produced by the Government Information Centre. (22) All these country specific servers generally link to information produced by the country's government, news sources and national academic institutions and research centres.
The page "Useful Pages Arranged by Subject", as its name implies, is a list of about 200 sites under broad subject areas. Click on Environment as an example and the first link displayed is Envirolink. (23) This site says that it is "the most comprehensive resource of environmental information available on the Internet". Other pages making up the Library Links list news sites, electronic journals, financial sites and banks' home pages.
The Library Catalogue will be mounted on the Intranet powered by a Z39.50 server. This will allow our clients, not only to search the Library collections, but other Z39.50 compliant library catalogues as well.