Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2008 21:31:42 +0530
From: L J Haravu
Dear List Members
I am responding to several mails we received after the announcement of
NewGenLib as open source. In particular I am responding to the very
relevant questions, suggestions of DR Arunachalam, Dr I R N Goudar and
Shwetank Upadhyaya.
1. The development company, Verus Solutions Pvt. Ltd.., (VSPL) and
Kesavan Inst. of Information and Knowledge Management (KIIKM) will
continue to work on new versions and enhancements to the software.
2. We will soon contact Developer communities interested in ILMS
software to download and join the development effort and/or give new
ideas that would help enhance the software
3. Right now, we are busy with building a new version (3.0) with many
new and customizable features and enhanced support to metadata and
interoperabiltity standards. In fact the requirement specifications for
this came jointly from FAO and us after a demonstration cum training
programme that was held at FAO, Rome in June 2007. The new version, also
open source, will become available sometime in June 2008.
4. Like other open source ILMS offerings, we hope that communities of
practice will emerge over time so that there is healthy exchange of
experiences and mutual technical support. 5. The discussion forum,
https://sourceforge.net/forum/?group_id=210780
should be used to report problems and solutions right from download
issues to those in the functional modules. There will be answers from
the developers and others that will hopefully democratize the support of
the software
6. There is already a specialist IT services company, a sister company
of VSPL called Verus IT Services Pvt. Ltd. (VISL) which will offer
customer-specific services beginning from Installation, data
conversion/data migration, training and ongoing support. These services
will be charged for and a package of services is being worked out and
will soon be announced. The idea is to help libraries implement the
software and build library networks via service costs rather than
product investments. We are also considering the possibililty of
subscription-based services.
7. We will be approaching funding agencies in India (DSIR, DOE, RRRLF,
etc.,) and abroad to help us conduct workshops and training programmes
in different parts of the country/overseas. We are also seeking support
of training centres such as DRTC and Schools of Library Science;
professional bodies such as ILA, IASLIC, RCIS, SRELS, INFLIBNET, other
library associations to help us take the software to public, academic
and research libraries. We will look forward to the suggestions and
support of the List members. DRTC has already promised their help. Dr A
R D Prasad as all of you know has been a champion of open source and he
has also been a source of inspiration to us.
I hope I have been able to answer some of the concerns and views
expressed by various professionals and I look forward to your support
and suggestions.
L J Haravu
Trustee, Kesavan Inst. of Information and Knowledge Management
