About the Source Document Library

The library is an on-line, www-based document collection on forests and forestry, with an emphasis on documents relevant to forests and forestry in British Columbia.

Plea for contribution of forest or forestry info documents!

Documents whose titles are found in a search of this library may be of several kinds. There are online documents stored on filesystems that are part of this project. There are www references (links) to on-line documents that are managed elsewhere on the internet. There are documents where only an abstract is available online in this library, but the document itself must be found in hardcopy. Finally, there are hardcopy documents for which only a traditional bibliography reference (not even an abstract) is available by searching this library.

The documents available will range from informal information and commentary to scientific papers, official reports, and excerpts from these.

The documents will have many different origins. Only a few of them will be directly produced as project group reports by the active members of the GRNSD project on Forests and Forestry in British Columbia, Canada.

Purpose

One purpose is to educate readers who are not informed or only partly informed about the issues within the scope of the project.

The second purpose is to serve as a reference library (an electronic nexus for all kinds of information relating to forests and forestry in British Columbia, Canada) to assist those who may wish to conduct research into any of the many subtopics, such as forest ecology, effects of harvesting, economics of harvesting methods, the political situation, or even the most ambitious research topics, such as how to achieve or how to evaluate improved methods or policies aimed at sustaining B.C. forest eco-systems while sustaining the ability of people to make a living from the forests.

Clearly, the library will have a long way to go before it can compete with hardcopy forestry and biology libraries, but it is hoped that it can become a central location for up-to-date information which will be more useful than its paper counterparts because the computerized WWW information system allows the information to be searched easily and organized in many useful ways for many different purposes.

The third purpose of the source document library is to provide ways of analysing and comparing points of view on the various issues, because there is no doubt that there is incomplete information on forests and forestry in British columbia, and no doubt that there is an unusual abundance of conflicting values, statements, theories and beliefs about the issues. One way of trying to sort through it all and put the viewpoints and issues in perspective is to attempt to collect diverse viewpoints in one location, and to provide methods of sorting through the information to determine:

• What information is coming from which sources
• Which information is of good quality (in the sense of being rigourous, coherent, well-referenced, etc.)
• Which sets of information comprise the various viewpoints about one particular issue