What is OECD? "The OECD is a club of like-minded countries. It is rich,
in that 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 the 1998 website)

The Center for Documentation and Information (CDI) of OECD provides
information to OECD agents in support of their research work. In 1998,
there were 60,000 monographs and 2,500 periodicals. The CDI also
provides information in electronic format from databases, CD-ROMs and
the internet.

Peter Raggett, head of CDI, has been a professional librarian for
nearly twenty years, first working in UK government libraries and then
at the OECD since 1994. He has used the internet since 1996. He built
up the CDI Intranet pages, which became a main tool for the staff.

Peter wrote in June 1998: "At the OECD Library we have collected
together several hundred World Wide Web sites 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."

Peter added: "The