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RESUME
OF THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
OF THE BARENTS EURO-ARCTIC REGION
"CULTURE. TOURISM. INFORMATION:
COORDINATED ACTIONS FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT"

    International Conference of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region "Culture. Tourism. Information: Coordinated actions for Sustainable Development" was held in Arkhangelsk from the 29th of June to the 1st of July, 2005.

    More than 80 representatives of libraries, information services, tourism companies, museums, governmental authorities, research and public societies, mass media from the Arkhangelsk, Murmansk, Vologda Regions, the Republic of Karelia, the Komi Republic, Finland, Norway took part in the Conference.

    The Programme of the Conference consisted of a plenary meeting and two sessions: "The Arkhangelsk Region as a tourism area", "Culture and information in the Barents Region".

    The participants' reports covered their activities in creating information resources and arranging an access to them, in preserving cultural heritage, in promoting cultures of the peoples inhabiting the Barents Euro-Arctic Region territory; the questions of culture and tourism development, libraries' abilities to support it with information services were discussed.

    The Conference have agreed as to the following:
  1. We have gathered here because we are united by the Barents Euro-Arctic Region. Our understanding of it has enlarged and has become clearer as the Conference proceeded. BEAR has got a rich cultural, historic and natural heritage, the study of which as well as its presentation in cyber space should be of great interest and undoubtedly deserves our coordinated actions.
  2. Tourism is interested in preservation of monuments of history and culture, in development of unique nature areas, and can do much to help them if it is targeted properly and if it coordinates its actions with cultural sector. Tourism development has a great importance for economics, for preservation and clever use of natural and cultural heritage, for strengthening ties between people, for creating a friendly image of the Barents Region outside its area.
  3. The successful future of tourism depends on many factors. We have discussed one of them, that of information, and we think that today we have a problem with the quality and accessibility of the information resources supporting tourism services, they are existing separately, as well as their producers. This problem deserves more serious discussion not only by tourism representatives but by people working in the neighbouring sectors of culture and information service. In contemporary world, overloaded with information, the role of libraries increases in making bridges between information and its users. Today humanitarian application of information and communication technologies in our libraries, our understanding of library humanitarian activities becomes very important. Information itself means not much unless it is transformed into knowledge. Libraries become a key medium in the process of such transformation into the knowledge of a certain person, in the process of eliminating informational inequality between people. We, librarians, should and we will influence the information production and its promotion among those who need it.
  4. Today libraries must try to navigate the whole potential of information as well as possible and to get as much information on information as possible. This brings up the question of having a kind of a virtual network of information centres, services, subjects of information activities in the Barents Region, which will help harmonize our actions in creating and using information resources, and stabilize this process.
  5. The Barents Region is a multicultural community, where much importance is given to libraries' work with local population, support of indigenous peoples. We hope it will help oppose unrestrained and sometimes unjustified globalization to some extent. It might be right to say that a librarian in the Barents Region is a multicultured person, the one who easily accepts modus vivendi which differs much from his or her own, the person ready to accept other cultural realities and peculiarities which exist in foreign cultures. At the same time a librarian observes norms and supports values common to all mankind.
  6. Libraries' and other social institutions' networking has become the only right vector of public and professional relations in solution of the problems and tasks that face the modern society. Today much depends on the formation of information and knowledge society, on the growing influence of information on people's life quality.