NATURAL DISASTER MANAGEMENT OPEN ACCESS REPOSITORY IN IRAN (NDM-OAR): THE IMPORTANCE AND NECESSITY OF A FEASIBILITY STUDY

Considering the importance of the natural disaster management (NDM) in Iran, and the impact of the information flow and management for the most advantageous use of information, the current study aims to investigate toward an effective natural disaster information management (NDIM) in Iran. We set two objectives as follows: (1) to find challenges in NDM with an IM approach, (2) to propose a solution with respect to IM capabilities. The information reported in this article is the result of a content analysis on research papers published on NDM, newspaper articles, and available gray literature (e.g. theses, best practices and lesson learned reports). Ten semi-structured interviews (purposeful sampling) have been conducted, and coded. Stakeholders participating was including several governmental agents, academicians, NGOs’ actors, and librarians (information science professionals). Given the results of the current qualitative, exploratory study, there are several main challenges regarding an effective NDIM which could be categorized under six main topics; information resources, information documentation, information sharing, information access, and information users. Seeking for the IM contribution to NDIM, digital library and digital repository have been studies and compared regarding IM criteria with respect to the NDM challenges also identified. Our findings support a feasibility study for developing an open access repository in the context natural disaster management (NDM-OAR) which appeared to be an advisablesolution to rectifying some of the main challenges of NDIM in Iran.

Keywords:

Open Access Repository , Digital Repository , Information Management , Natural Disasters , Feasibility Study