Each night, around 20,000 people--both adults and children--make the streets of Dhaka (the capital city of Bangladesh) their home. Living amongst the noise, rubbish, and traffic, thousands of families walk down the streets of Dhaka, looking for a safe place to rest for just a few hours each night. Trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty, the…

Severe unemployment problems spawned the Community Development Resource Center at Parkersburg Community College (West Virginia) in 1975. Its services to assist local economic planning and development include a comprehensive resource library, a monthly economic newsletter, conducting and publishing research studies, and providing community…

Digital inclusion is the ability of individuals and groups to access and use information and communication technologies. Not all members of a community benefit equally, and some communities have been left out altogether. This paper is a guide for fostering digital inclusion throughout the United States so that everyone can take advantage of…

The Community Learning Centers are adult education centers deliberately placed in the more remote areas. Using video as a medium, they offer people the opportunity to communicate among themselves and with the larger centers of decision making. (Author/BD)

Designed to meet total community needs in a new way, the Olney project, a merger of a public and school library, points the way to single unified community libraries. The new community-wide institution has merged the book collections and the functions of both without jeopardizing the clientele service of either. The Olney Venture was based on the…

Discusses the impediments to rural information services for community development in Nigeria, including skepticism towards information, poor roads, nonchalance of government officials, and rivalries. Highlights the nature and characteristics of a community and community information needs and services; identifies four components of community…

This guide presents basic information on searching the World Wide Web and lists selected Web sites and links to resources that contain information on rural development. The guide describes and differentiates among search engines, Web directories, metacrawlers, and mutations. Searching tips include: using quotation marks around phrases; using plus…

Describes activities developed by the Illinois Institute for Rural Affairs at Western Illinois University and the Illinois State Library to prepare librarians for a new role in local economic development. Discusses results of a survey on library support for community development in terms of services and business materials collections. (AEF)

The author argues that the appropriate type of citizen participation in an extension community development program depends on the goal for the program: creating community improvements or public policy education at the local level. He discusses the conflicting community-planning requirements between the two and stresses the need for extension…

A Televillage is a virtual community of people, businesses, government agencies, schools, libraries, health care providers, and others that have common goals or needs and are linked through telecommunications, information resources, and shared services. A Televillage can develop a strategic focus for community and regional development; organize,…

Both a description of the development of the community library in Olney, Texas, and an evaluation of its services are provided in this report on the merger of the town's three school libraries and one public library. The four libraries, which were all small, inadequate, underbudgeted, and understaffed, were run as a single unit from 1974 until…

From 1974 to 1979, the town of Olney, Texas, operated a single library which combined the functions, but not the collections, of their elementary, junior, and senior high schools, and public libraries. In June of 1979, they dedicated a new building which merged the collections of these libraries. Data for this evaluation and assessment of the…

Communications is critical to community development, especially rural communities that are poor, immobile and at a distance from a major metropolitan area. The isolation of these communities comes out of a need for cohesiveness within a system that functions for them. There is some mutual support between their economic, political, and social…

American rural communities are decaying, the underlying causes being chronic unemployment and inadequate infrastructure. The information age can cause the ultimate demise of rural America by further eroding local institutions or it can be its savior by revitalizing the sense of community. The link between community development and the information…

This report examines the perceptions of rural Washington community leaders concerning community information needs and the role of communication technology. In-depth interviews were conducted with 34 leaders in 5 selected rural eastern Washington communities that had access to telecommunications education and information systems, and with 15…