Libraries in Cuba: experiences of the MLGSCA Professional Development Award winner
Posted on November 30, 2011 by Amy Chatfield | 3 Comments
I received a Professional Development Award from MLGSCA this fall to fund a trip to Havana, Cuba, sponsored by the Special Libraries Association. I deeply appreciate being selected for this award and have submitted proposals to several conferences to discuss my experiences. I also wanted to provide information to my MLGSCA colleagues, so have written this blog posting to give you a brief account of our trip. I would, of course, be delighted to discuss Cuba with you in person at future meetings or via email—my contact information is at the end of this post.
My goals for the trip was to investigate uses of technologies in libraries, with a special focus on medical and health related libraries. Before I get into this, I’d like to briefly give some background information about the trip and differences between Cuba and America to give you some context.
The governments of Cuba and America do not have particularly friendly relations, so trade and travel is restricted. The United States government does not permit United States-owned companies to sell goods to Cuba, and does not permit Americans to enter Cuba. Our group applied for and traveled on visas adhering to one exception to this rule: professionals conducting research with a possibility of public dissemination upon return to the United States.
Our delegation consisted of 15 members from all over the United States, representing a variety of libraries. While in Havana, we visited eight Cuban libraries and the library run by the United States Interest Section (the Interest Section represents the U.S. government as there is no American Embassy in Cuba). Our group was accompanied by a guide/interpreter, enabling us to have conversations with the librarians and staff.
One of the most major differences between Havana libraries and libraries in the U.S. is access to computers and reliable networks. Only two of the libraries we visited had computerized catalogs. Most libraries have a few computers for staff use and some maintain computer labs (with less than 10 machines) that are available to the public, but these are not always connected to the World Wide Web. The computers we saw being used in libraries were not ancient, but not top of the line: the hardware looked to be of an early 1990s design, with CRT monitors as the standard. Cubans can access the web at an average speed of 8 megabits per second, compared to the U.S.’s average broadband speed of 4000 megabits per second. People in Cuba provided different opinions about how many websites are blocked by the Cuban government and how tightly the government monitors web users, so it is difficult to ascertain the truth. Since access to computers is limited, and web access is so slow, Cubans are limited in their ability to use web-enabled communications. Many libraries have developed intranets that are deployed in a limited area to enable networked communication: one public library stores copies of Wikipedia pages and other free websites on its intranet to permit their reference librarians to use these sources to answer questions, and the Cuba National Library has developed a national catalog of serials hosted on their intranet. However, networked communication and computerization are priorities for the Cuban government, and one university we visited enrolls over 10,000 students in computer programming courses. The country’s goal in the near future is to computerize business, government, and health care.
Health care related communication and information services are much more robust than comparable services in different fields. Providing health care is a major priority for the Cuban government. All Cuban citizens receive free health care. Students studying health care fields in Cuba receive free schooling in exchange for accepting job placements after graduation. The ultimate goal is to have a primary care doctor within walking distance of every person’s home in Cuba. This is not yet realized, but health care personnel are more evenly distributed throughout Cuba than they are in comparably sized countries. To support this vast network of health care personnel, the Centro Nacional de Información de Ciencias Médicas (or National Center of Health Sciences Information), runs a national intranet of medical information for health care professionals called InfoMed. This intranet provides email for health care providers and includes several thousand full text articles from major clinical journals; research articles, scientific/medically-related theses and dissertations written by Cubans; guidelines and protocols from Cuba’s National Health System; the Health System’s prescription drug formulary; and textbooks, handbooks, and reference books to support health care work. InfoMed also includes an office of translators who translates medical articles into Spanish from other major languages, and this group compiles a translation dictionary focusing on newer medical words and phrases to ensure similarity in translations. To ensure access to InfoMed, InfoMed staff members provide one computer and modem to every doctor’s office on the island, and they have established several classrooms throughout Cuba that are connected to a training room at InfoMed with real-time video and audio conferencing equipment. These training conferences are conducted by InfoMed staff and cover searching of the subscribed information resources and how to download full text materials. When I asked how InfoMed trainers convince older professionals who did not grow up with computers to use them—as this is a frequently-encountered generational divide at my work—they replied that having reliable access to a computer is such an unusual honor in Cuba that doctors are intrinsically motivated to use them.
The United States’ trade embargo does impact InfoMed’s ability to purchase information resources. It is impossible for Cubans to buy information directly from U.S. publishers. One result of this is that Cubans have committed money to local research and publications, and a significant part of InfoMed consists of publications written by Cubans, published in Cuba. In addition to aiding with the dissemination of this locally research information, InfoMed obtains subscriptions via non-governmentally-sponsored programs such as HINARI and Lilacs, buys materials from non-U.S. publishers, and obtains materials through open access channels, such as PubMedCentral, PLoS, and BioMedCentral. The embargo also makes it difficult for InfoMed—and other libraries—to obtain hardware and software to run their intranets or attempt to integrate new technology, and ingenious workarounds have been created by library staff. The Cuban programmers we met at InfoMed were justifiably proud of the data compression techniques they use to permit InfoMed to supply huge amounts of information through the slow connection speed of the modems used by doctors.
In the interests of space, I’ll wrap this post up here, but there are ways to learn more about our trip. Our group is collectively writing an article for Information Outlook, the magazine of the Special Libraries Association, with an expected publication date of early 2012, and we have also put our photos into a group Flickr pool. Individuals from our group will be submitting posters and presentations to conferences throughout 2012 and 2013, including MLA ’13, so look for Cuba-related topics at the next few conferences you attend. I would be delighted to discuss the trip with you, too, in person or via email. Please contact me by email.
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3 Responses to “Libraries in Cuba: experiences of the MLGSCA Professional Development Award winner”
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December 2nd, 2011 @ 10:56 am
Amy are you the recipient of the Professional Development award?? I see that you are the poster, just curious.
Thank you.
December 2nd, 2011 @ 11:25 am
Yes, I am!
December 2nd, 2011 @ 3:00 pm
Very interesting post. Thanks for the reply.