White Paper submitted for the Digital Library for the Maghreb Workshop Held in Washington, DC, January 24-25, 2011

Digital Libraries for Development: the potential for Tunisia
Rim Nour, 06’-07’ Fulbright Student Grantee to Columbia University International Development Consultant nour.rim@gmail.com

Building and sustaining a knowledge economy has become a pillar since the Tunisian five year plan for the period 2010 – 2014 and as such the country needs to invest in an adequate environment to foster knowledge creation, transfer and sharing as a major driving force of economic and social development. Progress has been steadily observed in areas related to education and ICT access and use but there is still a long way to go especially in terms of workforce development, which accounts for the main asset of the country. As such, digitizing and aggregating content as well as providing adequate access to a wide array of stakeholders (students, teachers, researchers, business owners, general public, etc) is likely to yield to a positive impact as to moving towards an innovative knowledge economy and allow for Tunisia’s libraries to have a more active role in economic development and business growth. The economic impact of public and private libraries There are numerous direct and indirect economic advantages to both digital public and privately owned or run libraries of which three obvious and priority ones for Tunisia: • • Fostering education: libraries support formal and informal education for both children and adult lifelong learners which in return impacts economic growth. Providing support to businesses: specific benefits relating to economic development and business creation and development are for example assisting in finding jobs and sector specific information as well as the diffusion of a new technology and knowledge transfer into the community. Digital libraries also reduce the cost of conducting market research and finding relevant real time information