The Elsevier Foundation

80% of the world's blindness is avoidable through treatment or prevention. The WHO's Vision 2020: the Right to Sight campaign targets curable blindness in their global campaign to impact vision loss. The Seva Foundation has proposed a compelling project aimed at benefiting hundreds of eye hospitals that lack organized resource centers and trained librarians. Eight collaborating resource centers in major recognized eye care institutions: Al Noor Magrabi Foundation in Egypt; Visualiza in Guatemala; Aravind Eye Care System, LV Prasad Eye Institute, Sadguru Netra Chikitsalaya, & Vivekananda Mission Asram Netra Niramay Niketan in India; Kilimanjaro Centre for Community Ophthalmology in Tanzania; and Lumbini Eye Institute in Nepal will work with the Seva Foundation and the Association of Vision Science Librarians (AVSL) to provide training, mentoring, and tool development to significantly enhance the librarians' ability to make relevant scientific, technical, and medical information available to eye doctors and health care workers locally, regionally, and globally.

While information and communication technologies have become more widely available in many developing countries, the skills needed to take full advantage of e-resources are still under-developed. The work of agricultural researchers and extension staff, who play a central role in economic development, is significantly enhanced by tailored training in the search, use and sharing of the information that is now accessible through these technologies. Sokoine National Agricultural Library, a university and national library with a mandate to disseminate agricultural information to Tanzania's diverse stakeholders, has developed a project with the potential for major impact on food production and security. It will strengthen the agricultural network within the country and will specifically target farmers--the most challenging link in the information literacy chain.

Evidence Based Health Care or Medicine (EBHC) is major priority in medical faculties, schools of public health, national ministries in wealthier countries and in the WHO. This project focuses on the key role played by information specialists in the practice and implementation of EBHC in the developing world. Medical doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers across eight African countries will be taught the skills of searching and retrieving, evaluating and implementing medical literature and evidence into clinical and public health to improve patient care. Courses will be conducted in medical schools, schools of public health and libraries in Ethiopia, Burundi, Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe, with a continuously growing group of partners. The project is driven by the Royal Tropical Institute in the Netherlands (KIT), the central partner in the Collaboration for Evidence Based Healthcare in Africa (CEBHA ), a network of faculties of medicine, schools of public health, ministries and NGOs that support an African healthcare system based on informed and evidence-based decisions. CEBHA will also provide the expertise to adapt the program to issues that are commonly found in the developing world such as feasibility, limited resources, medication compliance issues and alternative and complementary medicine.

On March 1st 1954, Bravo, the most powerful nuclear bomb ever tested by the US government, was detonated in the Marshall Islands. One thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, it led to significant radiological contamination and international concern about atmospheric thermonuclear testing which continued in the Islands for another four years. With a grant from the Elsevier Foundation this project will preserve the library of the Nuclear Claims Tribunal in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI). The Tribunal was established in 1987 as part of a settlement agreement between RMI and the US government. It gave the Tribunal exclusive jurisdiction to settle all claims arising from the Nuclear Testing Program. The library contains unique holdings with hundreds of scientific and medical reports, papers, articles and other documents relating to the nuclear weapons testing program conducted in the Marshall Islands from 1946 to 1958. The goals of the proposed project are to organize, stabilize, and digitize the library holdings and official files of the Tribunal in order to ensure that those records can be made available to future researchers, students, decision-makers, and other interested parties.

With a grant from the Elsevier Foundation, the National University of Laos will provide the Laos Library and Information Consortium (LALIC) with a unified and comprehensive open source digital library information system to increase library staff and users' access to scientific, technical, and medical information and materials. Researchers from across the 20 member library consortium will be able to access one search engine that compiles all metadata from the library collections' network and electronic databases; access library collections across member libraries; and specifies the location (e.g., university, library) to access publications.

With a grant from the Elsevier Foundation, the University of Cape Town Library will undertake a unique archival project to safeguard and make accessible a decade of critical 'primary source' knowledge on the social and political aspects of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa. Three thousand hours of video footage generated since 1998 by the Community Media Trust will be curated and archived to ensure that the largest audio-visual collections on the AIDS experience in Africa will not become lost to South Africa, the country with the largest number of HIV positive individuals—or to researchers and policymakers around the world.

Evidence-based strategies are needed to address the growing cancer epidemic in developing countries. The Eastern Mediterranean Region is predicted to experience a dramatic spike in cancer over the next twenty years representing 27% of the global increase in cancer incidence. Egypt alone will experience increases in cancer incidence of between 100-180% during the next twenty years. This Elsevier Foundation grant will enable the National Cancer Institute in Cairo (hosting the largest cancer hospital in the Middle East) to build evidence-based cancer care in Egypt. They will work in close collaboration with the National Cancer Institute in Cairo and Cairo University to provide Egypt's scientific leadership with a comprehensive and maintainable national record of cancer research with which to begin planning their national research agenda.

This Elsevier Foundation grant will enable the University of Pennsylvania to expand their "Guatemala Health Initiative" to deliver a medical library needs assessment and telemedicine pilot in rural Guatemala. The newly constructed Hospitalito Atitlán will host the library and serve as the project hub supporting surrounding rural healthcare providers with sustainable information resources, point of care clinical databases, mobile devices and content, technical support, and user training. A key element of the program is local training and capacity building to ensure the sustainability of the program.

Somaliland is ranked as 161 out 163 of the least developed countries in the world. Most hospitals were destroyed during their protracted civil war (1988 -1991) which resulted in a devastating brain drain of health professionals. With this Elsevier Foundation grant, the University of Hargeisa will establish a complete ILS or library automation system using KOHA open source software, training librarian staff, hardware acquisition and gaining access to online databases and journals. The new ILS will be an important step to helping the University of Hargeisa to serve the desperately needed trained professionals to regenerate its institutions.

This Elsevier Foundation grant will create the first of its kind large scale online "Service-Oriented Database of Cases of Emergency Management" (SODCEM) for use by Chinese researchers, students, policymakers and the public to raise the level of national expertise and reduce the losses caused by disasters. In 2008 alone, natural disasters caused a direct economic loss of 1.1752 trillion Yuan, while manmade disasters resulted in 1.01 billion Yuan and over 91,000 deaths in China. Partnering with the Illinois Fire Service Institute (IFSI) Library of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, SODCEM will be a multimedia subject database which contains 400 cases constituted by more than 2000 records of images and multimedia documents, using a web 2.0 environment to improve accessibility and analysis.

This Elsevier Foundation grant will enable hundreds of information professionals and researchers in developing countries to gain the necessary skills to exploit the wealth of information within the Research4Life programs locally through HINARI training workshops and the online distance learning course. Building on 2007 Elsevier Foundation grant, this renewal award ensures that the momentum established in research skills outreach over the last few years is sustained an continues to boost scientific scholarship in the developing world. Watch the Story

Dedicated to sustainable development, poverty alleviation, and environmental conservation, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, ICIMOD, is supported by the eight countries of the Hindu Kush-Himalayas (HKH): Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan as well as other sponsor countries. This Elsevier Foundation grant will enable the ICIMOD Library to transform a highly specialized regional traditional print library into a mountain development research portal on climate change, watershed, biodiversity, conservation, gender, medical plants, and the market serving researchers, NGOs, policymakers and rural mountain communities.

This Elsevier Foundation grant will enable the Thai Nguyen Learning Resource Center, the central library of Thai Nguyen University, to substantially boost Vietnamese scholarship and Scientific, Technical and Medical information exchange at the regional, national and international levels. Faculty, researchers, administrators, information and library professionals, technologists, and postgraduate students will be provided learning opportunities for enhancing effective scientific writing skills and the use of online tools and digital repositories through a series of seminars and targeted training events. This project represents an innovative and scalable model in both Vietnam and the developing world providing a freely available and localizable training module for the developing world.

With a grant from the Elsevier Foundation, Makerere University will combine information services with targeted rural medical outreach and reporting, demonstrating how librarians in developing countries can impact rural health workers and health outcomes. Critical medical information on rural health issues (infant mortality, HIV/AIDS etc.) will be repackaged to meet the information needs of Ugandan health workers. A team of doctors, nurses and midwives will provide hands on training and treatment for specific rural health crises which will be reported in expanded issues of the triannual medical digest produced by Albert Cook Medical library.

This Elsevier Foundation grant supports Book Aid International's project to improve access to health information to primary care health workers and consumer health information users. In partnership with the Kenya National Library Service network and Healthlink Worldwide, the project will develop the skills of 30 library staff across 15 key public libraries and will effectively repackage and communicate critical content from medical books to two underserved Kenyan communities: healthcare providers and users.

The Elsevier Foundation grant will help to lay the groundwork for China's first real time virtual reference system offering universities an opportunity to share information resources and staff expertise across CALIS, a consortium of 1,000 Chinese university libraries. This grant will address China's critical lack of well-organized collaborative digital reference systems which represent a significant barrier for university libraries seeking to offer users a high quality reference service and diffuse knowledge more broadly.

This Elsevier Foundation grant will assess and evaluate the present Eritrean clinical, medical and health information infrastructure to build an integrated information system grounded in evidence-based practice decisions. The immediate goal is to develop recommendations identifying the opportunities and barriers for dissemination and delivery of health information services to Eritrean health care professionals. Recently emerging from a 30 year struggle for independence from Ethiopia, Eritrea has no more than five physicians for every 100,000 people. This grant addresses "brain drain" in the long term by contributing new capacity for the first on-site graduate medical program in Eritrea. It also serves as an exportable model for other developing countries seeking to create sustainable clinical information systems to meet country-specific healthcare training and service needs.

The Elsevier Foundation grant will be used to develop a central library system to collect, document, and disseminate relevant HIV/AIDS research from the Centre International de Reference "Chantal Biya" (CIRCB) hub based in Yaoundé to outlying health institutes in seven of the country's ten provinces with extremely limited access to information. The CIRCB plays a leading role in strengthening regional research capacity and the prevention, treatment and management of HIV/AIDS, a highly prevalent disease in sub-Saharan Africa. The grant will leverage the strength of existing health, training and previous funding networks to share information on the latest literature and advances in HIV/AIDS treatment across the region.

A grant from the Elsevier Foundation will enable Bangladesh's BRAC University to implement a complete ILS or library automation system using open source software to enrich their infrastructure, serving as both a local resource and model for other Bangladeshi university libraries. BRAC or the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee is one of the world's largest NGO's working in the field of poverty alleviation, rural health care and education. The ILS project will facilitate internal processing activities, migrate and preserve data from the existing library systems into standard format, provide staff training, and ensure timely access to the information resources of the BRACU library's national and international resources.

An Elsevier Foundation grant will fund a comprehensive assessment of library and information services to support medical education and improve HIV/AIDS prevention, care and treatment in Botswana, a country with the second highest rate of HIV/AIDS in the world. The program draws on the University of Pennsylvania Libraries to contribute expertise to an established partnership between the University and the Government of Botswana, part of the African Comprehensive HIV/AIDS partnership led by the Gates Foundation and the Government of Botswana. Because Botswana is regarded as a testing ground for policy and practice in this area, this grant has the potential to be ground-breaking in identifying ways libraries can contribute to improved outcomes for HIV/AIDS patients in the developing world. Watch the Story

An Elsevier Foundation grant will establish the capacity in the Niger delta region of Nigeria to deliver ongoing training on access to online resources, and will serve all four of the major universities in the densely populated Niger Delta region. There is currently very low use of online library resources at the universities due largely to the lack of training and awareness of the availability of online resources among librarians, faculty, and graduate students. Under the proposal, the universities would establish and equip a permanent Elsevier E-Library Training Room, and fund the launch of a series of training programs targeted at librarians responsible for the health sciences, agriculture, pharmacy and science; academic staff; graduate students, and the wider university community. It has the potential to serve as a very concrete and replicable model for other countries and regions. The Training Room and course program would be maintained in subsequent years by the University of Port Harcourt, which has benefited from past support from the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa, which includes the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. Watch the Story

An Elsevier Foundation grant will improve the use and deployment of scientific, technical and medical information for disaster relief and reduction. The project will reinforce the efforts and initiatives taken by CRID in Central America and in the Andean countries to develop a "Latin American Virtual Library on Health and Disasters" to compile and share information on disasters, thus strengthening national and local capacity to manage and use health and disaster information. The grant will create a network of six centers in Central America and the Andean countries, which have among the highest incidence of disasters of any region of the world with major consequences for human life and economic development. The Elsevier Foundation grant will build the capacity of librarians to anticipate information needs during a disaster, deploy technologies for finding and disseminating disaster information, and participate more effectively in disaster-preparation and policy. It will also align standards and information management methodologies to allow for more extensive and efficient information sharing on disasters. The project has the potential to further demonstrate that the effective use and distribution of scientific technical and medical information, especially health information, in anticipation of and during disasters, has significant potential to save lives.

The Elsevier Foundation grant will extend the use of scientific, technical and medical information in East and South Africa in ways that will have a concrete impact on agricultural development. The grant will fund the grant will fund an audit of a large array of agricultural science and technology resources developed or acquired by FARM-Africa, a well-regarded organization with a 20 year track record in the region in support of community forest management, smallholder farmers, and pastoralist development. The long-term goal of the project is to compile and digitize extensive but geographically dispersed resources into a much more accessible web-based portal for use by farmers, NGOs, governments and the private sector across the region. The FARM-Africa website is already well visited for such a site in this region, so adding this new content has the potential to greatly increase access to important content across the region.
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A grant from the Elsevier Foundation will fund a highly focused and locally managed program to develop reference services at science and technology universities. References services are poor at these institutions and the library profession in Vietnam is viewed as an administrative function, rather than as value-adding and proactive. The project aims to use traditional training techniques and accepted materials to train librarians thoroughly in reference services and serve as seed professionals to spread knowledge to other librarians in their home institutions. The program provides essential training to address a basic need, which has the potential to have an important impact on science and technology in Vietnam.

The grant will extend for one year an existing program of workshops and curriculum development on the use of online resources, including Hinari, Agora and Oare, aimed at researchers, clinicians, government officials, and librarians in developing countries in Asia and Africa. It will also provide for the further development and deployment of an email training course that provides a less expensive channel for delivering training and that is scaleable to participants in other countries where distance and resource constraints prevent users and trainers from attending workshops. The grant will facilitate the development of a 'users survey' that will assist in establishing future training priorities. The Medical Library Association/ Librarians without BordersSM program conducted eight 4-day workshops on the use of HINARI in Nepal, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nigeria and Tanzania, resulting in significant increases in usage. Watch the Story

This grant will create a real-time virtual library reference service at Guangxi University of Technology, a comprehensive university focusing on engineering in Liuzhou City, China. By empowering librarians to take an active role in providing services for students, this program will not only promote public access to knowledge, but it will also serve as a model to other institutions in the region. The benefits will reach over 17,000 students, who will now be able to interact with librarians and find reference solutions any time, any place.

This project is focused on preserving and disseminating content in agriculture, fishery and forestry by enhancing professional knowledge and information literacy for librarians in agriculture, fishery and forestry universities in Vietnam. It will also establish a network of information literacy librarians who will contribute to the goal of producing high-level agricultural thinkers.

Traditional medicine has a very special place in the fabric of Vietnamese culture. This grant aims to preserve and sustain traditional thought in medicine by building a database for disseminating traditional medicine research results at Hanoi Medical University for use in combination with modern medicine in disease prevention and treatment.

This grant will result in the digitization of the first research & development library in Mongolia with the aim to digitize all doctors' theses and R&D. This project will mark the first digitization of medical information in Mongolia, making material available for wider use and dissemination and providing access to this information for scientists, students and the general public.

This grant will allow Suranaree University of Technology to begin constructing self-learning, computer-based modules to preserve and teach local and traditional knowledge focusing on science and technology for secondary schools in Nakhon Ratchasima, where Suranaree University is located.

Zhejiang University of Technology will use a survey technique to identify researchers' usage patterns, which will enable the libraries of Zhejiang to better meet the needs of their users. By filling in the gaps in use of A&I databases, the grant aims to increase the efficiency and value of A&I research in China.