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This paper aims to offer early insight into ongoing research comparing public access venues such as libraries, cybercafés and telecentres in 25 countries around the world.

The authors studied information needs and uses of information and communication technologies (ICT) in these public access venues, with a particular focus on underserved populations.

Understanding trends, differences and similarities across venues and across countries offers an emerging map that will help researchers and policymakers conduct future research and make better decisions to strengthen public access to information through ICT.

The research was done in partnership with local research teams in 25 countries around the world, and studied public libraries, telecentres and cybercafés side by side, while most studies in the past have looked at them independently of one another.

This paper aims to present the research methodology for the global study “Landscape of public access to ICT in 25 countries” (referred to as the Landscape study), a study conducted in 2007‐2009 by the University of Washington's Center for Information and Society, with a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The study looked at public access venues (public libraries, telecenters, cybercafés, other) that offer public access to information, especially through information and communication technologies (ICT), in 25 countries around the world.

The paper describes here the criteria for the country selection, selection of local research partners in each country, research design considerations, data analysis, and limitations of the study.

The scope of the research undertook meant sacrificing some depth in exchange for breadth resulting in a broad blanket of understanding over a variety of topics, but not enough depth to really understand their intricacies, causes or effects. In future steps the authors intend to explore ways to adapt the research framework to apply it to in‐depth studies of a particular country or context.

This paper presents a research methodology example that is transferrable to other multi‐national surveys.