at OECD countries produce two thirds of the world's
goods and services, but it is not an exclusive club.
Essentially, membership is limited only by a country's
commitment to a market economy and a pluralistic democracy. The
core of original members has expanded from Europe and North
America to include Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Finland,
Mexico, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Korea. And
there are many more contacts with the rest of the world through
programmes with countries in the former Soviet bloc, Asia,
Latin America - contacts which, in some cases, may lead to
membership." (excerpt from its website in 1999)

The OECD Central Library serves the OECD staff to support their
research work, with more than 60,000 monographs and 2,500
periodicals in early 1999, as well as microfilms and CD-ROMs,
and subscripions to databases like Dialog, Lexis-Nexis and
UnCover.

Peter Raggett, deputy-head (and then head) of the Central
Library, first worked in government libraries in United Kingdom
before joining the OECD in 1994. An avid internet user since
1996, Peter wrote in August 1999: "At the OECD Library we have
collected together several hundred websites and have put links
to them on the OECD intranet. They are sorted by subject and
each site has a short annotation giving some information about
it. The researcher can then see if it is possible that the site
contains the desired information. This is adding value to the
site references and in this way the Central Library has built
up a virtual reference desk on the OECD network. As well as the
annotated links, this virtual reference desk contains pages of
references to articles, monographs and websites relevant to
several projects currently being researched at the OECD,
network access to CD-ROMs, and a monthly list of new
acquisitions. The Library catalogue will soon be available for
searching on the intranet. The reference staff at the OECD
Library uses the internet for a good deal of their work. Often
an academic working paper will be on the web and will be
available for full-text downloading. We are currently
investigating supplementing our subscriptions to certain of our
periodicals with access to the electronic versions on the
internet."

What about finding information on the internet? "The internet
has provided researchers with a vast database of information.
The problem for them is to find what they are seeking. Never
has the information overload been so