Dear All, Mr Ehtesham has done a very good job of pointing out the most essential tools, modern librarians should know in the digital age. It is good that a few librarians, who are familiar with FOSS technologies and tools, are taking individual imitative of different sorts in helping the fellow librarians to learn and use those tools for furthering information activities for which the profession stands. This kind of peer training- learning process may help the profession in its strides in gaining better status, pay and role in this digital environment. Sometime ago, Mr G K Manjumdar & Mr Singh had made some efforts in developing a public database of such IT friendly librarians. That attempt did not go much ahead. This is the right time to give a push to the voluntary peer training, given up once. Simultaneously, some of the new learners can self-learn some of those tools with the help of simple tutorials available in the net. They can seek the support of the peer tutors for comparatively complex tools or on the part where support is needed. In self-learning, one should start with the simple and the most useful. So it seems that the best bet, as the first priority item, is the Greenstone Digital Library Software. Greenstone installation has become much easier by now. Installation of Greenstone 2.81 is a matter of a few mouse clicks on the pre-requisite Java2 Runtime Environment and Greenstone software. Building a digital library with it is a simple exercise of giving a name, gathering some documents and clicking on the Create button. Creating Browsing Classifiers and Search Indexes are the items that require some knowledge. The voluntary peer-training will also work well with those who tried the tools themselves and learned the whereabouts. Regards, K Rajasekharan Kerala Institute of Local Administration Thrissur ------------------------------ Original Message: Date: 22 Dec 2008 06:06:45 -0000 From: "Ehtesham" <ehte786@rediffmail.com> Subject: [LIS-Forum] ICT - Open Source tools for Library 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.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). Ehtesham (+91)9985100322 ehte786@gmail.com -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.