Information Centers and Socioeconomic Development in MENA; Finding a Quantitative Relationship

Even though it may seem that information floats on its own throughout the Internet, in reality someone must make policies and financial decisions to gather and organize data and prepare it for retrieval at the appropriate time. It must be stored in various formats in information hubs. These information hubs are essential components of the Internet, itself an essential component of socioeconomic development. But are these information hubs acknowledged in international development planning in the Information Age? This paper discusses information centers – libraries, archives and museums - in the context of coordinated global planning for socioeconomic development and offers a metric by which information centers may be correlated to a country’s social and economic advancement. It concludes with reflections about information components of the United Nations (UN) 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and the needs to gather data and expand information centers in order to achieve sustainable development.