"Democracy is a form of governing where each person receives what most
people deserve."(apud Davidson) It is more and more difficult to explain
today the notion of isolation, either reported to our private existence
or to our social existence. The notion of majority, of world is imposed
to us more and more brutally. Willing or not, we exist together with the
others, by them and for them.
When in 1990, the countries from Eastern Europe were submitted to a new evolution, they simultaneously submitted to a temporary isolation that determined, for a short time, an individualised development. Starting with 1992, new linking bridges were set re-establishing the ancient reports in a new context. On the international market of information in the East, there were accepted as a consumer having needs equal to the others and treated for the first time as potential producers.
The idea of databases with shared responsibilities was something new.
New was only the idea of a consensus and of professional ethics concerning
this transnational activity.
In the new field of activity, that of information and documentation
in agriculture, the activity of Romania as a participant to the agricultural
database was limited to the activity of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences
to the AGRIS database, activity that became more and more insignificant
after 1992 (about 30 inputs/year) So, what happened and is happening? A
misunderstanding of the notion of decentralisation and a lack of coherence
of the individual strategies made that, at a regional level, nobody charges
to co-ordinate an apparently inefficient activity. The lack of a national
agricultural network contributed more to the dispersion of initiatives
and forces.
When, on 1992, our Documentation Centre initiated the National Seminar of Communication and Information Sciences, we were sure that we'd succeed, gathering specialists from all over the country, in offering them the motivation for beginning a new collaboration that will become known both on the national and international market.
The seminar, national at the beginning, that we initiated succeeded on 1994 in gathering colleagues from the libraries and documentation centres in Romania and establishing a list of priorities in the documentation activity according to the specific fields (agriculture, husbandry, veterinary medicine, horticulture, natural sciences, environment and its protection, geography-geology, and last but not least the agro-alimentary policy and industry in Romania). There resulted clearly that the lack of co-operation is due to the lack of a performing software and a co-ordinator in the regional and/or national level.
On 1995, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovenia, Albania and Moldova Republic announce their presence next to two delegates from France-INRA, stating simultaneously the wish to be integrated to a common program answering the appeal we launched in order to contribute to the elaboration of a new strategy of the East-East co-operation.
On 1995, the priorities of a documentary specialised information are established and, starting on 1996, the documentation coming from abroad is integrated to a program called INFO-DOC DISSEMINATION.
Any foreign document come by donation or purchase is free of charge put at the disposal of the colleagues in the agricultural network. The lists of documents( books, reviews, theses, conferences) are communicated at the beginning of each year so that a circuit of them could be scheduled and efficiently managed.
Since 1996, the seminar is concerned with the setting of some technologies compatible with the electronic transfer of information and documents and by SOROS Branch from Budapest it gets the access of the partners of this program to INTERNET.
This year session was dedicated to "Management of Information and the Electronic Documentary Products" and aimed a prospectation of the needs of partners in the field of great databases ( CAB-like, 10-20 years) and of CD-ROM full text documentation.
The Subregional Office for Central and Eastern Europe in Budapest delegated its representative which proposed the possibility of co-operation with FAO and WAICENT. The seminar facilitated the contact of the specialists with two great suppliers of electronic documentary products: SWETS&ZEITLINGER and Lavoisier.
The 1997 seminar established the theme of the next seminar (1998), too: "Teamwork and training in Central and Eastern European documentation area".