(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 (Nairobi Cluster Office), organised by the Kenya Information Preservation Society (KIPS), and held at the Jomo Kenyatta Memorial Library. Several people spoke at the opening ceremony and of interest was the presence of Mrs Jacinta Were, the eIFL country coordinator for Kenya. She was also part of a Steering Committee which in 2005 was involved in the initial feasibility study for the establishment of a Greenstone Support Organisation for Africa.
 
A total of about 24 participants (mostly librarians) were trained and given attendence certificates on the closing day. We borrowed a bit from the Lesotho workshop style by concentrating on the general DL issues on the first day. This was of great benefit to some of the participants who (believe it or not) thought Greenstone was some scanning software! It was also interesting to note how digital libraries have been so closely associated with scanning that people sometimes fail to realize that there are many many collections that they can build from "born digital" material.

KIPS has to date produced a Greenstone CD-ROM of a list of abstracts of Theses and Dissertations about Kenya. Infact, most of the participants were drawn from organisations that contributed content towards this collection. There was also a demo of a Greenstone CD-ROM of articles on Gender Issues from Kenyan newspapers by the Kenya Indexing Project.

With KIPS playing a leading role, there's much potential for big time Greenstone projects in Kenya, moreso since they've already set the pace by virtue of their existing collection. They expressed great zeal to establish a network of "Greenstoners" in Kenya and judging from the performance of some of the participants, the future looks bright. If KIPS can work closely with other organisations, e.g., the local eIFL consortium (Kenyan Libraries and Information Services Consortium - KLISC) much can be achieved to build an effective user and support network. We also continually encouraged the participants to play an active role on the sagreenstone discussion list, in addition to using the other technical support resources.

We also had Zoe Cormack from the Rift Valley Institute giving a brief talk on their work on the Sudan Open Archive project. This was an eye opener for many who got to get ideas of how to handle complex scanning/digitisation issues.

The UNESCO representative, Mr Hezekiel Dlamini (to whom we're quite grateful for inviting us to assist in running this workshop) also indicated willingness to have an advanced workshop - which, however, would only be for those institutions that would have evidence of some work with Greenstone.

On the whole, we had an interesting week in Nairobi, not to mention the confusion on the roads! To quote one taxi driver, some tourist once exclaimed, "Anyone who can drive in Nairobi for a month without a scratch deserves an international driving license!"