Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
twofold: first to give useful guidance to Malawi National Library Service in meeting the information needs of village communities, and second to throw some light on the confusing messages which emerge from the published studies of information and communication in the villages. The specific objectives of the project were to examine the chain of communication between providers of information (chiefly government ministries and agencies) and the ordinary citizens in the rural communities who are the intended users of this information. This was done at three points: in the agencies which create information packages for dissemination; amongst the intermediaries who actually do the dissemination; and with the inhabitants of the villages, whose needs the packages are intended to serve. Opinion and experience was collected which reflected the communication process from the viewpoint of each participant group. By this means, strengths and deficiencies in information transfer were identified. The results are a contribution towards understanding an information environment which presents unusual degrees of challenge for both the information seeker and the information worker. Indeed, the African village, impoverished, neglected, and frequently isolated by geography, language and culture, represents one extreme in a global range of information environments which stretches from virtual reality back through to painfully hard reality. That it is a fascinating and complex environment was recognised by European travellers with their tales of a dark and mysterious continent, but the work
Sturges et al. (Sat,) studied this question.