Dear Friends, Excerpts of National Workshop on “Design and Organisation of Institutional Repositories (IR) Using DSpace (1.5.2)” organised by Library and Information Centre, B. N. M. Institution of Technology, Bangalore on 9th January 2010. The workshop witnessed astounding response from 180 plus delegates across the country out of which 110 participants were from the VTU affiliated engineering colleges. The Inaugural function commenced with the welcome address by Dr. K. Udayakumar, Principal, BNMIT. The program formally inaugurated by lighting the lamp by Prof. Balaji, Registrar, VTU, Dr. I. K. Ravichandra Rao, Professor, DRTC, ISI, Prof. B. C. Rajanna, Chairman, BNMIE, Sri. Narayana Rao Maanay, Secretary of BNMIE. R. M. Puttaswamy, Librarian, BNMIT and Organising Secretary, presented a brief note on the workshop. Dr. I. K. R. was felicitated by the management of BNMIE. After the felicitation Dr. I. K. R. delivered keynote address on the importance of IR, Issues, Challenges and he emphasized on the OAI and Metadata Harvesting. He has thrown light on digital revolution, advantages and objectives of IR. He pointed out, how students can make use of IR in their learning. He discussed about the content and management in terms of written policy on development of IR and indexing the content in IR. Another guest Dr. K. V. A. Balaji, Registrar, VTU, spoke on the strengths of Visvesvaraya Technological University in terms of no. of colleges, no. of UG, PG and Research Programs. He has appreciated the development of libraries in knowledge creation and dissemination. He also assured that university will provide any kind of support to interlink IRs developed by colleges with VTU research portal. Elaborating further, he mentioned that libraries should attract youngsters and make optimum utilization of available resources. Sri. Narayana Rao Maanay has released the DVD of the workshop. Prof. B. C. Rajanna delivered Presidential Remarks and he pointed out that how libraries are transformed from the traditional to virtual form. Prof. T. J. Rama Murthy, Director, BNMIE proposed vote of thanks. Dr. M. Krishna Murthy, DRTC was the resource person for the technical session; he delivered presentation on “An overview of Institutional Repositories – A present scenario & IR Open Access, Archives, OAI-PMH working principles”. After the first technical session, Sri. R.M. Putta Swamy, briefed about the Institutional Repositories maintained at BNMIT Library by Using DSpace. This session was well interacted by the delegates by getting the tips and ideas on design and organization of institutional Repositories. Afterwards participants were moved to computer lab for hands on session on installation of Fedora 9 operating system. After the delicious, lunch brainstorming hands-on-training session on DSpace 1.5.2 was started. The current version of DSpace 1.5.2 software was successfully installed and all the delegates were happy and expressed their satisfaction. Sri. Choudappa N., President, AKELPA felicitated the engineering college librarians who achieved their Ph.D. degree recently. They are, Dr. Dinesh K. S., who completed his Ph.D. degree under the supervision of Dr. Khaiser Nikam, UOM, Dr. K. R. Mulla under the supervision of Dr. Chandrashekar M., UOM and Dr. H. M. Chidananda Swamy under the guidance of Dr. B.U. Kannappanavar, Kuvempu University. Soon after the high-tea, concluding session commenced with a welcome speech by Dr. K. Ranga, Dean, BNMIT. Sri. R.M. Putta Swamy, presented the detailed report about the workshop. Few of the participants gave the feedback about the workshop. Sri. P.S. Manjunatha, Librarian, MBA library introduced the Chief Guest Dr. M. Krishna Murthy. Dr. Murthy spoke on the advantages of DSpace to colleges and said that in India this is the first workshop on DSpace 1.5.2 latest version of DSpace. Sri. Maanay delivered presidential remarks and expressed his happiness over the turn out as he was not expected and analysed it as created benchmark in the institution. He also opined that it is necessary to equip oneself to serve better in library to meet the challenge of the future with advent of future ICTs. Dr. Shana D. Gowda, Professor, concluded the session with vote of thanks. At the end there was a huge appreciation from the delegates about the arrangements, hospitality of the BNMIT. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Posted by Dr. Dinesh K. S. Advisory Committee Member and Participant of the Workshop dinesh.ncet@gmail.com -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.