Library and Information Science

In the so much sophisticated society of today universities are facing many critical problems in accomplishing their responsibility. These problems may be summarized as follows:

1. The exponential increase of information makes difficult for the teachers, researchers,and students to catch up with the advancement of their fields of concern.
2. The increase of student populations results in the shortage of teachers,equipments, and buildings.
3. The growth of universities in size and activities,expansion of the academic fields, and increase of the complexity in each field produce two sorts of gaps in higher education.
   1. Small universities and colleges can not provide expensive and high-quality educational resources and libraries.
   2. In large universities students can not enjoy warm contacts with faculty members, in other words education is becoming impersonal.

Since these problems are so heavy for each university or college to solve only by itself, it is indispensable to cooperate with each other to tackle them.

The Interuniversity Communications Council (EDUCOM) was established to solve them by introducing new communication technology into activities in higher education. EDUCOM’s function is to facilitate better communication among universities and colleges to overcome the above-mentioned problems. Its main concern is centered around computer systems and information network.

This paper describes EDUCOM in terms of its history, purposes, activities and so forth.