Uses of the Internet and Internet services in Mali : the role and positioning of libraries ; Usages d'Internet et services d'Internet au Mali : rôle et positionnement des bibliothèques

Since the Sumerian period (4th - 3rd millennium BC), libraries have been able to process documents in order to make them available to the population for their intellectual, cultural and economic development . ¶ To meet the information needs of all the socio-professionnal strata, they have taken various forms: national, public, specialized, scolarly, academic . and this, in all the countries of the world.¶¶ With the rise of the web and the progressive access of people to online resources, the technical and financial partners of African countries began to help them, in the second half of the 1990s, to connect to the Internet. ¶This was also the beginning of various projects to create telecentres in order to popularize the Internet and to enable African populations to access information for their development. ¶These new structures (community or private) have been seen by many as the only source of access to information. In this context, libraries, with already meager resources in our countries, have appeared as obsolete, even useless structures. ¶ Documentary information professionals then began to question the future of their profession and libraries. ¶ In their reflection, the Internet has sometimes been perceived as a threat to libraries, as a technology like any other, or as an opportunity to seize in order to develop their resources and their know-how.¶Considering the Internet as an opportunity, however, requires librarians a new perception of their mission, a new organization of work, new products and services, and a new vision of relations with the public. ¶ This requires especially the appropriation of Internet and an active role in its use in order to disseminate your resources, facilitate access to those of others, promote your products and services, diversify, retain and empower your users in research and exploitation of resources . ¶ Thus, the question arises of the role of libraries in the development of Internet uses and services.¶ Our study seeks, in the Malian context, marked by the extreme poverty ...