A Rational System for Editing and Publishing the Literature of Tropical Agricultural Resource Assessment and Development Planning

Abstract

The literature of tropical agricultural resource assessment and development planning is characteristically written by government departments or by teams of consultants and is non-conventional, bulky, fragmented and difficult to retrieve. Since the early 1960s? the Land Resources Division has publicised its main findings but has encountered difficulties in meeting conflicting needs: in particular the client government’s need to receive recommendations for development quickly and in confidence, the writer’s desire to meet the most exacting demands of his fellow scientists, the requirements of the developing world at large and the needs of information services to retrieve the documents. There have also been complaints of delays in presenting results and of the excessive bulk and technical detail of the numerous reports which emerge from an assessment project. To improve this situation LRD has analysed the contents of its six different series of project reports and has related these to specific categories of readers, e.g. client government executives and scientific advisers (“participants”) and non-client scientists and aid agencies (“spectators”). A flexible system has consequently been designed at LRD whereby the documents produced by a project team are visualised as outputs of a production line to be prepared individually or assembled in combinations to meet the needs of specific reader categories. Each document so produced is coded to relate it to the project and in addition provided with a document control sheet to facilitate recognition and retrieval. The main types of documents under the new system are Project Records (mainly supportive data of prime interest to scientific advisers), Project Reports containing recommendations for action and Land Resource Studies (printed volumes, derived from the Project Reports and supported by microfiches of selected Project Records for the permanent use of all reader groups). The editorial section of LRD has thus sought a creative role in structuring, condensing and distributing the results of tropical resource assessment. To fulfil this role, editors must work in the field to assist team managers in processing materials for the benefit of specific readers. Finally it is shown that the lessons learnt by LRD are applicable in any situation where complex projects of resource assessment and agricultural development are reported.