AN EXPERIMENT IN INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION: E.P.A. TECHNICAL DIGESTS

European Productivity Agency (E.P.A.) was set up in 1953, by the Organization for European Economic Co‐operation (O.E.E.C.), in order to handle projects designed to help to make possible rapid increases in productivity in member countries. E.P.A. has a Technical Information Section, under Dr. Norbert Grell. One of the projects of this section is the production of E.P.A. Technical Digests. The purpose of the project was to enable technical people, particularly those in small and medium‐sized firms, to read, in their own language, digests of articles describing plant, processes and materials which could be widely applied, and would have an immediate effect in increasing productivity. Behind the digest project lay such ideas as the following: whereas a Norwegian physicist, for instance, could be expected to learn, via scientific abstracts, of important work in his field published in, say, Italy—and, if the work was important enough, to have it translated—a Norwegian foreman would almost certainly never know of some useful practical workshop hint published in an Italian journal; to meet the foreman's need, a digest, simply written in his own language, and preferably illustrated, would be needed—an abstract would be insufficient, and a full translation of the original article would often be excessive.