Recently I was in Bamako, Mali, visiting the ever impressive Abdrahamane Anne at the Library of the Faculty of Medicine Pharmacy and Dentistry, University of Bamako. The purpose of my visit was to gather information for a case study   on the Koha ILS pilot work that Anne, as he is known, is leading there. I spent two full days with Anne as he walked me through his methodology for exporting and migrating their catalogue data which is currently held in a non-standard CDS/ISIS database. Anne's solutions to a variety of tricky problems to get the data into standard UNIMARC format for importing into Koha were a delight to see. But this post is about something apparently only tangentially related to the eIFL-FOSS ILS project.

The Library of the Faculty of Medicine Pharmacy and Dentistry at the University of Bamako is not presently blessed with an abundance of network connectivity. There are (or were) no public access machines with which researchers might query their legacy CDS/ISIS database. A traditional card catalogue is the primary search tool that students use, unless they wish to request a specific computer search to be undertaken by one of the 3 library staff who share an office. But all that is about to change.

Through the kind offices of a colleague in France, Anne has come into possession of a number of near-obsolete computers. Obsolete, at least, in terms of the environment in which they were originally located. But here, where resources are a bit thinner on the ground, these machines will soon to be turned into viable public access machines for users of the library. And the path to this lay in a FOSS solution implemented at Birzeit University: LTSP, which stands for the Linux Terminal Server Project.

Anne had read about the work of Dr. Wasel Ghanem, head of the Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering department at Birzeit University through the eIFL.net spotlight article. Once he had those machines arrive from France he could seriously contemplate doing something with them. It did not take long for me to connect Anne and Dr. Ghanem. And that connection is already bearing fruit.

I heard from Anne last week with news that he has successfully implemented his LTSP installation. He is using a set of Pentium III machines as his thin clients and a Pentium IV as his LTSP server. All that is left now is to gather sufficient network and electrical cables and his library will have public access machines available for its users.

And what exactly will these machines be accessing? They won't be accessing the Internet, at least not for the foreseeable future. What they will be accessing is the Library of the Faculty of Medicine  Pharmacy and Dentistry's new Koha OPAC (Online public access catalogue). What started as a project to introduce a full-fledged FOSS integrated library system to this library has grown into the target of a new LTSP installation that will transform the users' interaction with the resources in the library.

One FOSS project connecting to another FOSS project building a new FOSS-enabled future. Yeah, that sounds about right to me.