This study arose from my first professional work in 1973 while engaged in the National Youth Service Corps programme. I was then attached to the Rivers State Ministry of Education, Inspectorate Division, as a school librarian. Many foreign organisations and individuals had generously donated large consignments of books and other reading materials to schools and libraries in the area to offset the losses incurred during the Civil War between 1967 and 1970. These consignments were kept unused in a warehouse in Port Harcourt pending the time when the officials from the Ministry of Education would decide on how to distribute them to schools and libraries in the area. In September 1973, a decision was taken to share the books among the various schools and colleges that could 'evacuate' them from the warehouses without further delay. Being the only school librarian in the Ministry, I was given the responsibility to carry out the distribution. The arbitrary and hurried manner in which the distribution was effected was not the way in which the overseas donors would have expected or desired. Consequently, there arose in me a desire to take stock of past foreign aid to libraries in the country at large with a view of determining how they had been utilized.

The issue of centralization vs decentralization in university library systems is studied in the context of Saudi Arabia. After a review of the relevant literature, background information is given on Saudi Arabia, with special focus on the higher education sector and its development, and on university library systems. The present situation of three selected university library systems is examined in comparison with library standards, together with the attitudes of users and professionals to .different aspects of the library systems and their quality. The methodology used was descriptive and analytical research, and data were gathered by distribution of three sets of survey questionnaires. An analysis and discussion of survey results is presented in chapters on library use, user satisfaction and user views. A summary of findings and an indication of both general and specific recommendations complete the thesis.

The concept of resource sharing has, of late, engaged the increased attention of librarians and information workers, and various conferences and seminars have been devoted to its exposition in one form or the other. The Airlie House Conference of 1970 and the Pittsburgh Conferences of 1973 and 1976 are some of the notable examples of this growing interest. Although these conferences and. seminars have shown predominant concern with resource sharing in the context of the developed countries, the interests of the developing countries have not been entirely neglected as the IFLA/UNESCO Pre- Sesssion Seminar of 1977 shows. The basic motivating factors behind resource sharing in the provision of library and information services are the acknowledged impossibility for any library or information centre to be self-sufficient, and the nedd to co-ordinate activities in order to avoid unnecessary duplication in the provision of the services. Additionally, technological progress has made library co-operation a lot more feasible than it has ever been. These factors are relevant to both the developed and the developing countries and therefore make resource sharing a concept of common interest and relevance, too. However, the developing countries have to adopt strategies that are different from those of the developed countries in the interpretation and application of the concept. This is because in the developed countries, the resources are, by and large, in existence and are available in considerable quantity. In the developing countries, however, the reverse is the norm. The resources are generally scanty, and the supporting services are comparatively weak. So while the main concern of the developed countries may lie in the development of schemes for the sharing of the existing resources, to the developing countries, resource sharing should mean more than that; it should be seen as an essential part of the wider task of resource building. These two aspects (i. e. resource building and sharing) should be considered together to make the concept meaningful to the developing countries. This interpretation of resource sharing forms the basis of this work, and the existing resources in English-speaking West Africa (comprising The Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone) have been reviewed with these two aspects in view. In addition to individual country assessment, the opportunities for resource sharing at the subregional level have also been examined. For ease of reference, the tables accompanying this text have been prepared separately as Volume Two.

The thesis covers construction, application and evaluation of a stemming algorithm for advanced information searching and retrieval in Latvian databases. Its aim is to examine the following two questions: Is it possible to apply for Latvian a suffix removal algorithm originally designed for English? Can stemming in Latvian produce the same or better information retrieval results than manual truncation? In order to achieve these aims, the role and importance of automatic word conflation both for document indexing and information retrieval are characterised. A review of literature, which analyzes and evaluates different types of stemming techniques and retrospective development of stemming algorithms, justifies the necessity to apply this advanced IR method also for Latvian. Comparative analysis of morphological structure both for English and Latvian language determined the selection of Porter's suffix removal algorithm as a basis for the Latvian sternmer. An extensive list of Latvian stopwords including conjunctions, particles and adverbs, was designed and added to the initial sternmer in order to eliminate insignificant words from further processing. A number of specific modifications and changes related to the Latvian language were carried out to the structure and rules of the original stemming algorithm. Analysis of word stemming based on Latvian electronic dictionary and Latvian text fragments confirmed that the suffix removal technique can be successfully applied also to Latvian language. An evaluation study of user search statements revealed that the stemming algorithm to a certain extent can improve effectiveness of information retrieval.