Teaching Tough Stuff: Teaching Students to Locate and Use Statistics on International Telecommunication Systems

Abstract

The comparative study of national telecommunication systems requires up-to-date statistical information. These data might include the number of radio and television stations and receivers, daily and nondaily newspapers, scholarly and popular periodicals, telephones, and the like. The telecommunication scholar teaching a course on comparative national systems or independently researching this field and, of course, the librarian charged with providing the bibliographic support of either effort must necessarily develop ingenious strategies for obtaining recent statistics. Only the most comprehensive research collections will possess more than a handful of statistical compilations for the world's developing nations. Indeed, for many nations an equivalent to the Statistical Abstract of the United States might be unavailable or perhaps nonexistent.