Knowledge hub takes step forward with online archive

(R) Senior Deputy Director Dr David Ayres and NRI Director Dr Charles Yala taking a look at the new website.

By MATTHEW VARI

Sunday, October 9, 2016 (Sunday Chronicle, PNG)

WITH the launch of the new look Papua New Guinea National Research Institute (NRI) website launched on Tuesday- the site will now feature an online archive of all research material reports by the country’s top think-tank.

Moving towards its building of a ‘Knowledge Hub’ concept at the institute, reports as far as the mid-1970s will now be publicly available on the site for download to interested users.

Senior Deputy Director Dr David Ayres said the access to the institute’s research material is vital in creating awareness through the public to enable inquiry, information, and influence to issues of national importance.

“NRI is committed to building what we are calling the Papua New Guinea Knowledge Hub- a place to bring together stakeholders- whether those stakeholders are from the private sector, development partners, the government, interested researchers, and other stakeholders to begin to address and think about the development challenges in Papua New Guinea,” Dr Ayres said.

“At the moment we have a hundred and fifty or NRI’s reports on the website. One of the processes that we have started in the past couple of months is digitizing all of the NRI archive, and over the next few months the entire NRI archive will be on this website.”

“So NRI started back in the mid-1970s and the intention is that everything that has been published by NRI since the mid-1970s will soon be available as a PDF for download on the NRI website.”

Ayres pointed out the institute’s previous website created issues in terms of access to various papers or reports published online for interested users.

“What we have tried to do in the new website is to create a situation that with just a number of clicks people can find the information that they are looking for.”

“If you are on our website and click on the publications page, that will then bring up a list of NRI’s publications. You can filter that for publication types and you can search for particular publication by key words.”

“What we are trying to do is create a very simple navigation process to be able to find your way around the website and I would like to invite everybody to have a look at the website.”

The website is available at nri.org.pg.