News

Welcome Ethiopia

Following first contacts during the IFLA conference in Durban, and a short visit and workshop in December, the consortium of Ethiopian academic libraries CEARL are partnering with eIFL in strengthening their consortium and exploiting more fully access to electronic resources, as well as becoming actively involved in the eIFL-FOSS program. We give a warm welcome to Derib Erget, head of the university of Addis Ababa faculty of technology library as the eIFL country coordinator, to the CEARL chairman Ato Girma Makkonen, the director of the AA university library, and to the Ethiopian library community at large. Ethiopia already has access to a range of e-resources through INASP, and we look forward to partnering with the consortium in making the most of these and new resources. We also acknowledge with gratitude the contribution made by Heidrun Bayer and her organisation, the Engineering Capacity Building Program of the GTZ, the German Development agency, in getting us off to a good start. CEARL has just recently held a successful workshop on Greenstone (please read our May-June 2008 Newsletter)

Greenstone Training Workshops in Ethiopia

The southern African pilot project has facilitated a radiation of expertise in Greenstone to other areas of Africa. In Ethiopia, a 5-day Introductory Greenstone Training Workshop and a 3-day Advanced Greenstone Training workshop were organised in Addis Ababa from April 29 to
May 7 by UNESCO in cooperation with the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), the
Consortium of Ethiopian Academic and Research Libraries (CEARL) and the African Union (AU). 25 trainees participated in the introductory workshop and 12 in the advanced workshop.

The lead instructor was Professor M. G. Sreekumar, coordinator of the South Asia Greenstone support effort (http://greeenstonesupport.iimk.ac.in). This training event aimed to support digital library capacity building of information managers, librarians and archivists, working in public and private universities in Ethiopia, as part of a larger initiative that seeks to strengthen the CEARL network and to facilitate the exchange and use of information resources. The workshop will also serve to launch an Amharic Greenstone localization project.