Community Access Point in Indonesia: Improving Access to Quality Information and Promoting Local Potentials

The social, cultural, economical and geographical diversity of the country of Indonesia recognized in its motto: “Unity in Diversity”, is bothan opportunity and a challenge for the development of an Indonesian information society. It is an opportunity as it is a natural source of riches for avibrant development. It is a challenge as distribution, heterogeneity and autonomy makes the integration of information and services more complex at all levels of the national information infrastructure. One particularly critical aspect of this complexity is the disparity between big cities andremote rural areas, largely due to the unbalance inresources. In this paper, we propose the Community Access Point (CAP). CAP is a peer-to-peer architecture for a digital library that can serve as a platform for the interoperation of distributed, heterogeneous and autonomous information sources and services. The features of CAP make it a suitable and economical solution suited to the needs and capacity of remote and economically challenged communities.