Dear Friends,

I am Mohammad Ehtesham staying at Hyderabad, student of LIS and working in a software company as consultant. I have done installation implementation of many open source tools for different organization.

I came across the mail posted by Mr Vimal in this forum in which he offered his help to get the Koha installed for the libraries. It was really a wonderful approach towards the Open Source initiative I am sure many would have appreaciated this. Moving ahead I have a thought which I want to share with you all.


The present day society is characterized by:

  1.    Increasing Information of society.
  2.    Information Overload.
  3.    Technology has become an integral part of offices / homes.

And library serves as knowledge resource center, information provider and knowledge repository etc. ICT is now become inevitable for any library irrespective of its size and kind of users it serves. Now days more or less every body is relying on Google and referring it as a great library on this planet. Yes I agree but does it mean we should close our library! No we can't dare to do that.

Therefore it's now time to advance our library services and fulfill the needs of the patrons in a better way what Google and other search engines are doing. Yes whenever the question of precision comes to meet the user needs our library always wins the race. So we only need to change the way of service not the kind of service because our user behavior has changed they became more tech savvy.

What to do ?
Technology is fear for beginners it is not tough. There are number of open source tools for ICT - (well tested and widely applied) available which can be freely downloaded and implemented with minimal desired customization. This won't impact in libraries shrinking budget. Only we need to acquire hardware and download freely available tools.

No doubt there is huge list of open source tools available on the web but to start with here I am mentioning a few well known widely used tools which I came across on which any one can work out for there respective libraries:

1. NewGenLib or Koha (Library automation tool)
2. DSpace, GSDL or ePrints (Digital Library).
3. Moodle (Elearning tool)
4. Joomla or Drupal (CMS)
5. WordPress (Blog tool)
6. MediaWiki (Wiki tool)
7. OpenURL suite (CUFTS - knowledge base consortia tool, Godot - Link resolver & DbWiz - Federated search engine)

I hope this will be useful for you. I am open to help and available (No Charge) if any one who needs help in installing and implementing these softwares for their respective libraries on weekends (Sat & Sun).

Please let me know.


Thanks & Regards
Ehtesham
(+91)9985100322
ehte786@gmail.com