Nowhere has this progress occurred more rapidly than in computer technology. And the impacts have been enormous.

Once upon a time there was the bulletin board, the phone call, the hand-written note, and the chat over a cup of coffee. Today they seem like some kind of arcane ritual.

But the fact is, the paper note, the quick call or the short visit to a colleague’s office remain among the most effective ways of sharing ideas and information.

Nowhere was the truth of this more apparent than in a recent project CIFOR assisted in west Java.

Known as the Gunung Halimun National Park Management Project and managed by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and Indonesian partners, the initiative’s aim is to become a model for strengthening national park management across Indonesia. A key strategy in achieving this is to provide environmental education through sound ecotourism practices. CIFOR’s role was to provide project personnel with access to its wide ranging data and information.

Ms. Mariko Hatta (nee Masada), a Junior Expert from JICA, was working with ecotourism and environmental educators at a school near Gunung Halimun. As part of her job she would visit CIFOR to share information about the park and to collect data about the forest and the environment.

It was during one of these visits Mariko raised her concerns about the challenge of sifting through the vast amount of information relevant to Gunung Halimun.

Her concern was not with the way CIFOR’s resources were organized, but with the volume of it and how long it took to find what she needed.

“It’s great having zillions of megabytes of very important and relevant information, but you also need zillions of hours to deal with it”, Mariko said.

“The environmental education material for Gunung Halimun has been used over and over. But doing the computer searches to access it each time and find the piece of information I wanted was really time-consuming. It was a bit like the U2 song, ‘I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.’”

“The hours spent searching really eats into the time needed to train people and build capacity,” Mariko said.

Mariko’s solution was simple. With assistance from CIFOR’s scientist Dr. Takeshi Toma, Mariko narrowed down the material she needed for her classes. She then placed hardcopies of the selected CIFOR publications she wanted on the shelves in the park’s school libraries.

“The technology we now have for storing information is a marvelous thing, but it is far from perfect,” Mariko said, “I don’t claim to have the solutions, but I think we have a long way to go in making it easier for people to wade through the tons of data available.”

Says Dr. Toma, overseeing Mariko’s efforts, “There was once a time when it was said the computer would usher in the paperless office. But what Mariko has done is show us that the old paper-based way of sharing information can sometimes be more efficient than having a thousand internet search engines. I appreciate her efforts because it was a very effective and appropriate way to deliver CIFOR’s messages to that particular audience.”

With all the information they need now sitting in the library, the trainees no longer suffer the U2 blues of not finding what they're looking for.

They just go to the library. Grab what they need from the shelf. And then discuss it over a cup of coffee...Java coffee!