Dear All,
The recent Drupal workshop at NCSI was a meaningful attempt to capacitate librarians in opening new ways of information dissemination with a good content management tool.
Libraries or institutions having local area network (LAN) can think of using Drupal (or Joomla or similar one) for creating an intranet website that provides information content to the institutional users through a website- like a gateway. Drupal requires apache, mysql & php software – all installed and configured in the computer. The configuration of those software may fail at times. So the easier option for a beginner is to use Xampp software that includes all the three software. So any beginner who is interested to learn Drupal can do so by installing it even in a client computer by using Xampp. The advantage of the content Management System is that we can have local language content and can make search /retrieval, if the information is in Unicode font.
By using the same Xampp installation, one can install Wiki software also in the same computer and can develop an internal Wikipedia for creation of frequently used local content for internal users. Even reading materials on key topics can be made available in LAN by using internal Wiki. Media Wiki is a reasonable choice among a wide range of Wiki software available for download. Having an internal Wiki may help the users in learning the process of editing the content in Wikipedia. So the creative users may eventually turn themselves as contributors of Wikipedia, the fastest growing segment in the digital world. Librarians, thus, can have partnership in building the knowledge repository by showing the users a method to build digital knowledge resource.
Moodle is an E-Course Management software one can install in the same computer by using the same Xampp installation. Libraries can use it for offering compensatory or additional courses on topics of special interest among the users, with the help of library friendly academics or library professionals themselves.
The screenshots of Moodle installation on Windows is available at http://docs.moodle.org/en/Windows_installation_using_XAMPP Installation on Linux is also similar.
The installation of Drupal or Wiki can be done in the similar manner. Open Journal System is yet another similar tool, the librarians should look into.
Exploring all these tools will be a way ahead in empowerment in this bewildering digital world.
Regards,
K
Rajasekharan
Kerala Institute of Local
Administration
Thrissur