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The Norwegian Ministry of Environment has undertaken to build and implement a meta information system for environmental information/data. The objective is to increase availability of cross sector information and efficiency in use of environmental information/data. The system is to be accessible via Internet, but based on SQL‐database. Further the same system may be used locally by the governmental institutions and centrally at national level. Access will be public and free of charge, software will be free of charge. The metadata will be characterized according to European standards; amongst others, by use of the multilingual environmental thesaurus (GEMET) and a standard for mandatory field entries. Interoperability with other systems is assured by used of standard communication protocols (Z.39.50). To define objectives at a high precision level and to have a development guide, a technical “Systems Requirements” were defined. Development is done with users, and by means of prototypes, laboratory and field tests.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the preservation and dissemination of women's cultural heritage in selected university libraries in Nigeria.

The descriptive survey research design using questionnaire to collect data was employed.

The study revealed that non-print materials constitute an average of about 28 per cent of the forms in which cultural heritage materials for women are obtained and preserved in some Nigerian leading academic libraries. Over 50 per cent of the respondents in their views agreed that the benefits are accruable when women's cultural heritage materials are kept including enhancement of public perception of women, improvement in accessibility to information about women, improvement in the visibility of women as essential contributors to the development of the society, fostering of tourism among others. The most prominent barrier that the respondents believed could hamper the preservation of women's cultural heritage materials was the adverse tropical climatic conditions.

It encourages information experts to engage in capacity building for effective preservation and dissemination of cultural heritage information that are gender related. It also stressed the need for networking and collaboration among information experts as an essential strategy in promoting women's cultural heritage information system. All stakeholders are urged to prioritize and demonstrate fiscal commitment towards the preservation of cultural heritage resources. This paper was presented at IFLA Women, Information and Libraries Satellite Conference, 2012.