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Appendix:
Study of Public Information Resources available in the Central Government
Summary
Consultant: Francisco Martínez Alas
The study assesses existing public information resources in El Salvador and public access conditions, with the goal of providing inputs for the design of a national public information policy.
Visits were conducted to 23 representative agencies of the central government, including ministries, official agencies, and semi-autonomous agencies; government Internet sites were also analyzed. The products of the study include a basic catalogue of printed resources and public registers, comments on the production and dissemination of an array of informational resources and relevant policies, a general description of production and publication cycles for this information, and a database of all variables considered. The appendices to the study include detailed descriptions of Websites produced and maintained by 23 government agencies.
The institutions are classified according to six different criteria: principal focus of their information resources, principal focus of their resources by user group, overall assessment of policies and structures which govern the management of these resources, principal services which provides access to the information, types of information resources produced and managed by the agency, and principal types of users.
The study makes special mention of judicial and legal information centers, which have made efforts to integrate their cycle of production, systematization, and dissemination of information, and have maintained a high quality of information processing. It also highlights the importance of efforts to build a national inventory of Geographic Information System (GIS) resources throughout different agencies.
There is a trend among 52% of the sample –with varying degrees of development in practice– to build integrated information centers, with specialized libraries, coordination within internal units of the agency, publication of Websites, and other related aspects.
The chief limitations found were the lack of sufficient technological sophistication to digitize information; serious limitations in the distribution of the information that is produced; the lack of standards for electronic information processing; and the lack of overall norms to define access rights by the public to different types of information (classified vrs. unclassified).
The study recommends a series of useful aspects for designing a national public information policy, including a series of governing principles and factors, considerations on conditions of access to public information, and suggestions to broaden the scope of this study to include the entire array of government agencies.
All rights reserved. Permission is granted to reproduce all or part of this publication as long as the complete source is cited: Conectándonos al Futuro de El Salvador, "Strategy for Building a Learning Society", San Salvador, 1999, http://www.conectando.org.sv/English/Strategy/
