Publications

NEW AND NOTEWORTHY

Shaver, Lea Bishop (2008). Defining and Measuring A2K: A Blueprint for an Index of Access to Knowledge. SSRN Working Paper Revised March 2008, publication forthcoming in Information Society: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society. Accessible at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1021065
Access to knowledge is increasingly recognized as the central human development issue of our time. Yet to date there has been little literature defining precisely what is meant by this term, much less how to evaluate the progress toward achieving it. To help bridge this gap, this article offers a blueprint for an A2K index: a quantitative tool integrating a variety of data points to assess how well countries are doing in promoting access to knowledge. The proposed index tracks five key dimensions of access to knowledge: education for informational literacy, access to the global knowledge commons, access to knowledge goods, an enabling legal framework, and effective innovation systems. The resulting conceptual map offers a concrete introduction to the A2K framework for information scholars and professionals.

Menou, Michel, Schement, Jorge Reina, Taylor, Richard (2008). “INTRAMIS: Toward A Collective Effort in Order to Make Measures of Information Societies More Meaningful / INTRAMIS: INTRAMIS: HACIA UN ESFUERZO COLECTIVO PARA TORNAR MÁS SIGNIFICATIVAS LAS MEDIDAS DE LAS SOCIEDADES DE LA INFORMACIÓN (Available in English and Spanish). IV Seminario Internacional sobre Estudios Cuantitativos y Cualitativos de la Ciencia y la Tecnología, Havana, Cuba.

Interest in producing measurements to inform our understanding of how information technologies have shifted the sources of welfare within human societies have received erratic cycles of attention since the 1960s. Currently many organizations produce composite measurements of the information society based on collected data related to information technologies. However, there is great diversity of vision and methodology between these systems of measurement. There are at least seven problem areas that call for an open and critical dialogue. Can coherent and possibly compatible models be arrived at? Does “one size fit all”? Variables in data collection, methods of statistical analysis, interpretation and utilization of measurements and participation in the process raise serious issues. This paper introduces a new online portal, “Intramis”, which has been conceived and created to facilitate the work of those practitioners engaged in the “Grand Challenge” of developing coherent theory and application of the metrology of information societies.