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Improving social science in the former Soviet Union
Improving social science in the former Soviet Union Author:Paul C. Stern Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Appendix: Working Group Reports EMERGENCY NEEDS The group began its discussion with a consideration of what is meant by emergency aid in the context of ass... more »isting the social sciences in the Russian Federation. The term was judged to encompass those activities that are urgent and demand immediate attention or that threaten serious, negative consequences if action is not taken in the immediate term. Projects that could be undertaken quickly, that would be stimulative of longer term measures, and that could provide encouragement to a demoralized scientific community were also seen as falling within the purview of this session. The group also focused on measures that were considered to have a high probability of success, that could be implemented at relatively low cost, and that had a high probability of receiving funding in the near term. The issue of providing assistance to the Russian Federation, rather than to all the successor states of the former Soviet Union, was also discussed. Although the impetus for the meeting came from the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the group urged that the needs of the social sciences in the other republics not be overlooked and that efforts be made to include social scientists from the other republics in any programs developed as a result of the meeting. The key issues before this group can be divided under two headings, conservation and communications. Under the heading of conservation attention focused on library and archive collections. Both the buildings themselves and the collections they house are decaying and in some instances are on the verge of irretrievable ruin. Materials that constitute not only priceless and irreplaceable Russian national resources, but also vital international research collections are at risk,...« less