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Electronic Information for Libraries
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Greenstone training workshop, Nairobi, Kenya, 22-26 September 2008 - report(Guest blog post from Amos Kujenga, National University of Science and Technology (NUST) Library, Zimbabwe)
The week before last, Misheck Nyaluso and I were at the University of Nairobi where we conducted a 5-day Greenstone Workshop (from Monday 22 - Friday 26 September). The event was sponsored by UNESCO (Read More... ACCESS2008: Library Technology Conference, 2-4 October 2008 - reportMaybe it's just me but sometimes I need to recharge my batteries. Here is my solution: spend a couple of days with energized library technologists, FOSS developers, and systems librarians. Well, I did say that maybe it's just me. Fortunately my batteries got a full charge this week at Access2008
Software Freedom Day - 20 September 2008Is your library "connected"? I mean connected to FOSS community outside your doors? Do you know who is working with FOSS in your local community? Do you have regular contact with them, perhaps through your friendly local Linux User Group (LUG)? And if not, how do you get your library involved wit
Community Liaison - the intersection of FOSS users, developers, and businessesThe recent appointment of K.G. Schneider - prolific blogger on librianship, writing and everything else, since 2003 - as Community Librarian for Equinox marks a significant milestone. It is significant both for the FOSS development community behind the Read More...
The Code4Lib Journal - essential readingAs readers of this blog will know, I am not a professional librarian, and I am also not, by training, a programmer. Fortunately for me, around the time I started working closely with librarians and (even more scary?) software developers for l
NewGenLib - a new FOSS ILS ready for useNewGenLib, which stands for New Generation Library, is an integrated library system (ILS) that some of you, especially those in India, Syria, Sudan, or Cambodia, will already know. It is the product of a 4-year collaboration between the Kesavan Institute of Information and Knowledge Management (KIIKM) and Ver
IRC: information on tapInternet relay chat (IRC) is a familiar communication tool in FOSS development and user communities. It can be vibrant, fast-paced, friendly, exceedingly geeky, and ideal for getting a quick response to a hard question you just haven't been able to sort. If you have not tried it previously then now is
OLA Super Conference: the profession of librarianshipThis past Thursday and Friday I attended the Ontario Library Association (OLA) Super Conference in Toronto, Canada. It is a huge annual event in the professional librarianship calendar in Ontario (and beyond) with more than 1000 delegates and up to 29 parallel sessions running at any one t
OLPC: open source, open access, open library - University of WindsorRecently I had the good fortune to be invited along for a special evening celebrating, publicising, and enthusing about the One Laptop Per Child project organized by Mita Williams of The Leddy Library at the University of Windsor. I had been asked to speak on the s
Zotero - a FOSS tool for publishing and managing bibliographiesZotero (http://www.zotero.org) is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension for managing and citing references and creating bibliographies. Zotero is the FOSS alternative for EndNote®, the product of Thomson ResearchSoft, a business of the Thomson Corporation.
I tested Zotero on Arme ILS Migration - the long gameThis past Friday, I had the good fortune to meet up with John Fink at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. John is Digital Technologies Librarian in the Mills Memorial Library at McMaster. Amongst his numerous responsibilities, 50% of John's time is devoted to managi Open Translation Tools, day 3The final day of Open Translation Tools 2007 found us tired yet eager for more. We followed a similar pattern to day 2 with parallel sessions dominating, punctuated by another SpeakGeeking session. By this day, I had a much clearer idea of what I needed (at least in regard to the challenges ahead for the eIFL-FOSS ILS Open Translation Tools, day 2Day 2 at Open Translation Tools started bright and early. And just as interactive as day one. Now that we all had a bit more knowledge under our belts, it made sense to go around the room again and ask each participant to identify something specific they definitely wanted to get to before the end of the next day. For Open Translation Tools, day 1 concludedDay 1 finished off the way it had begun, with plenty of interaction amongst the participants. We started by dividing into two groups, those who had use-cases describing content in need of translation, and those who had translation tools to discuss and enumerate. I was in the group attempting to characterize clearly di Open Translation Tools 2007, day 1I am in Zagreb, Croatia, today with a fabulous collection of folks passionate about open content and FOSS translation tools. Open Translation Tools is organised by Aspiration and the Multimedia Ins
FOSS policy: personal and publicShould I have a personal FOSS policy - a set of principles by which my software decisions are made? I suppose in some sense I already do. I use Mozilla Firefox all day long, every day. I use OpenOffice wherever possible. I use GIMP<
Getting started with a new FOSS community: user email listsHow do you get started with a new FOSS community? Perhaps someone recommended a software package to you. Or it came up in a news story. Or someone spoke about it at an event you attended. Or someone has told you (your boss?) that you need to get familiar with it. Or maybe you are just curious and want Free Software & Open Source Software Symposium - Toronto (day 2)Day 2 of this conference started better than day 1 since I didn't get lost getting here. First up for me today was a talk entitled The Development Commons: A Virtuous Circle of Software Production for Virtuous Organisations. The presenters for this were Jason Cote and Julian Eglestaff, both of
Free Software & Open Source Symposium - Toronto (day1)I have the good fortune, for once, of living close enough to Toronto to participate in this year's Free Software & Open Source Symposium. Two days of talks on subjects ranging from Open Content: Shared Curricula in a Web 2.0 World, to Reading and Reviewing Code, to Open Source
Welcome to the eIFL-FOSS blogFirst blog posts are notoriously content-free. But not this one. Instead of just saying, "Hello, world!", I will try to outline how I will be using this blog in future, the kinds of posts you can expect to find, how this blog relates to projects within the eIFL-FOSS program, and how to respond to blog entries. But first, let me tell you w
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The eIFL-FOSS program manager is Randy Metcalfe. The eIFL-FOSS ILS project coordinator is Tigran Zargaryan. The Southern African Greenstone Support Network project coordinator is Repke de Vries. If you have questions about eIFL-FOSS or one of its projects, please feel free to contact us using the following email addresses: |
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