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the field, complete with the authors’ addresses so that interested
persons can contact them directly, but of course we could not even
attempt to include all the applications disciplines, such as geology,
soils, vegetation, etc. In a subsequent reader survey, I discovered
that exactly one-third of our alumni were cut off from all other pro
fessional publications, and that while several hundred of them used
the journal abstracts as I had hoped they would, most of them did
not.
About two years ago--after writing a stack of rejection letters to
Third World authors—I decided that this had to stop, and I hit on the
idea of starting an "adoption agency" for journals and books. It
seemed simple enough: find out who needed what, who had what and get
the two together. Since the ITC Journal is also sent free to many
remote sensing centers in the Third World, I even knew where most of
the likely recipients were. I could simply canvas their librarians,
put a small notice in PE&RS that we were looking for "orphans" and
everything would fall-into place.
Then I thought perhaps I should see if anyone in Holland had any expe
rience in this sort of thing, and I discovered the "Netherlands Peri
odicals Project" in which the various Dutch universities donate sur
plus publications to selected universities in Third World countries.
The problem is that the recipient universities are in what are called
"target countries"—a list of eight to 10 countries that the Dutch
government singles out ea.ch year for an especially heavy concentration
of development aid (the Dutch really do donate a bit more than 1 per
cent of GNP to development assistance) . The administration of the
project requires one full-time person, and his annual budget is some
thing on the order of US$ 70,0 00. I wasn't awfully keen about the
target country part of it, there was no possibility of hiring anyone
to work even part-time, and hopes for a budget of any consequence were
nil.
I then learned of the work of AGID—The Association of Geoscientists
for international Development--an international organization that
operates a journal adoption agency from Canada. By this time, I was
asking a better class of questions, and of course I got a better class
of answers. I contacted Tony Berger (who was administering the pro
ject), who is also active in the ICSU Press--an arm of the Interna
tional Council of Scientific Unions, of which I believe ISPRS is a
member. ICSU Press operates its own publication service, and it also
tries to obtain extra copies from journal publishers for distribution
to the developing countries. I
I learned from Dr Berger that many of my apprehensions about setting
up this adoption agency were well-founded. With a finite supply of
materials, how do you decide who gets what? ' How do you ensure that
the materials sent actually remain in an open library and not on the
director's shelves? Do the donors send the materials directly to the
recipients or are they better sent to some intermediate point and
shipped from there. If so, where is this intermediate point? Where
do you get the money for postage? Are there problems with customs?
