Success Story of the Information & Documentation Services of the Bay of Bengal Programme
The Bay of Bengal Programme (BOBP) and its successor the Bay of Bengal Programme Inter-Governmental Organisation (BOBP-IGO) have over the years built a strong reputation of engaging the stakeholders, especially with regard to documentation and dissemination of knowledge products, ranging from highly useful and reputed technical reports to training manuals, popular journals, magazines, posters, comic books, leaflets, video films, annual calendars (which are theme based covering a topical issue), etc. While the primary documents have been in English, many of them have also been translated into vernacular languages, covering the 12 languages spoken in the coastal Districts/Union Territories of India, Bangladesh, Maldives and Sri Lanka for easier knowledge transfer.
Besides printing of activity-related documents, the Programme has also been instrumental in translating and printing important documents originating from UN agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Labour Organization and other international agencies so as to allow such documents to reach a larger audience, especially at the grassroots level. The Programme has translated the 1995 FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries (CCRF), its simplified version and the numerous Technical Guidelines in support of the implementation of the CCRF into several languages spoken in the member-countries, thus facilitating the reach of knowledge to the last mile in the Bay of Bengal (BOB) region. In total, the translated versions would be running into a couple of thousand pages.
The wide use and utility of the documents can be gauzed from the fact that the demand for printed versions has never diminished. Many documents have runs into second or third print versions. Examples: The Sea Safety Manual was first printed in 1993 and by 2009 the document had to be printed twice. ‘Fishes of the Maldives’, a bilingual treatise (English and Dhivehi languages) went into second print and is part of the O and A level school curriculum in the Maldives. The poster on ‘Cetaceans of the Tropical Indian Ocean’ was first printed in 2009 for the ‘Indian Ocean Cetacean Symposium’ held in the Maldives in July 2009. Subsequently, the then Vice-President of the Maldives (Dr Mohammed Waheed Hassan Manik) requested BOBP-IGO to have the poster re-printed in sufficient numbers and in a larger size so that each school in the Maldives could have one poster framed and placed at a prominent place for the students to see. The poster on ‘Commercially Exploited Groupers of Maldives (in Divehi language)’ is another example of reprint and is particularly popular with the law-enforcement agencies in the Maldives.
The multi-lingual set of 12 posters on the CCRF adorns a very large number of Fisheries Offices, Institutions and in the premises of our development partners in the region. Their demand is never-ending. The BOBP-IGO’s posters on ‘Safety at Sea’ have been immensely popular and recently they have also been translated into Burmese language for use by the Myanmar fishermen. The BOBP publications are available in the libraries of many UN Organization, chiefly the FAO (David Lubin Memorial Library) in Rome. The US Library of the Congress and the Smithsonian Institute regularly source our publications. In 2009, the Musée National de la Marine, Paris, France sough pictures from BOBP-IGO’s publication on ‘Traditional Fishing Boats of the Bay of Bengal’ for a book that the Museum was preparing for an exhibition. Further, they also sought footages from BOBP’s two video films (New Canoes for Sri Lanka and Better Days in the Bay) for a documentary that the Museum was preparing. The Museum organized the exhibition during March to October 2010.
Besides printed documents, the BOBP has one of the best collections of photographs on small-scale fisheries spanning about 40 years in time horizon and covering more than 13 nations (within and outside the BOB region). The visual archives are catalogued (frame by frame) and we have also built a data base of selected images (about 50,000 images) that are provided free of cost to a large number of agencies and individuals. Many agencies world-wide (including GEF) have used the BOBP images in their publications. Under the Ocean Partnerships Project also a sizeable visual documentation has been created and about 1350 images are posted on the website https://www.oppbob.org/. More images will be posted on the website in due course.
Starting from the introduction of Fibre-reinforced Plastic (FRP) into the BOB region as a boat-building material in the mid-eighties and the setting up of model boat building yards in India, Maldives and Sri Lanka, the BOBP has contributed immensely to the designing and fabrication of FRP boats in the region. Almost all the small and medium-sized FRP boats (ranging from about 9 - 20 meters OAL) in India and Sri Lanka owe their basic design to the BOBP. The last design and two model FRP boats based on the design were fabricated in the year 2010 (IND-30) and the design is now being used by small-scale fishers in Andhra Pradesh, India. The purpose of highlighting this boat design and construction activity is to emphasize on the fact that all the designs and blue prints are properly retained in the archives of the Programme and provided to user groups as and when requests are received.
Each and every activity undertaken by the BOBP is well-documented and widely disseminated. The ‘Library and Documentation Service’ of the BOBP runs a very well-coordinated programme of maintaining the publications and their dissemination at regular interval. Documents are also disseminated in the meetings/workshops/consultations that the BOBP staff attend or when such events are organized by the BOBP.
The BOBP documents and information/awareness material also take full advance of technology to ensure that they are user-friendly. For example, guidebooks that are to be used by fishers in their work place are printed on synthetic paper so that they do not get damaged by water or stained by grease/oil. Similarly, leaflets aimed at dissemination of information to fishers on a 24x7 basis are also on printed on synthetic paper so that they can be pasted on the vessel itself.
Many of the BOBP’s publications still retain their uniqueness by being the only publication on the subject from the region. All the BOBP publications from the period 1980 – 2001 (prior to the digital era) have been digitized and available in the form of a set of Interactive CD-ROMs. The two CD-ROMs contain more than 20,000 pages and form a very valuable record of literature from the BOB region. With the assistance of the Ocean Partnership Project, the Library Services were further upgraded into a ‘Knowledge Centre’ with advance internet and video-conferencing facility.
In conclusion, it may also be mentioned that the region is still not as internet savvy as one would have assumed. Lack of continuous power supply, inadequate band width and poor connectivity are some of the major issues in the region (more so in smaller towns and rural areas in the region). Therefore, print versions of documents are still in great demand and cannot be totally substituted by electronic formats. Further, the large number of fisheries institutions (with libraries), District/Provincial Offices of the Department of Fisheries in India and the other member-countries all rely heavily on print versions of the documents for their day-to-day reference.