Meeting/Seminar on Promotion of Free and Open Source Software in Pakistan

Posted on August 7, 2010 by admin

LISolutions® in collaboration with University of Waikato, New Zealand, organized a seminar/meeting cum Hi-Tea on “Promotion of Free and Open Source Software in Pakistan” at Islamabad Club on Friday August 6, 2010.

Mr. Shafiq Rana coordinator- LISolutions® shared with the participants about the aims and objectives of the organization. He also talked about the trainings/seminars and workshops organized by the organization on voluntary basis for the LIS professionals.

Meeting/Seminar on Promotion of Free and Open Source Software in Pakistan

New Zealand Digital Library Project, University of Waikato has selected LISolutions® as National Node for the Greenstone Digital Library Software in Pakistan. It is further to share with immense pleasure that LISolutions® (Pakistan) has elected as a Vice Chair of Digital Library Network in South Asia which is an honor for us.

Mr. Ata ur Rehman discussed about the activities related to the promotion of Free and Open Source Software by LISolutions® especially Greenstone Digital Library Software and Koha in Pakistan. He shared his ideas and roadmap for upcoming activities to promote the FOSS movement in Pakistan. He requested to the participants for their support to conduct the various events for LIS professionals in collaboration with LISolutions®. He extended the services of LISolutions in digitization process on voluntary basis so that the collections may be brought online.  LISolutions can took selected collections as pilot project(s)  to publish them on the web on voluntary basis.

We are pleased to share with you that all the participants extended their support and most of them became the members of LISolutions® to get support regarding the GSDL and other FOSS applications in future.

We are very grateful to our respectable teachers, senior professionals, and friends for their trust and cooperation to establish such professional platform in Pakistan. We invite all of you to join us for the capacity building of LIS professionals in Pakistan as well as in South Asia.

We invited the LIS professionals for this meeting from Peshawar, Lahore, Bahawalpur and Islamabad; the following were the participants:

S.No Name Designation Organization
1 Ch. Muhammad Nazir Director General National Library of Pakistan
2 Afshan Amir Director-IRC US-IRC, Islamabad
3 Yaqub Ali President PLA (FB)
4 Saleem Ahmad Librarian Supreme Court of Pakistan
5 Saima Qutab Librarian DG Mines and Minerals, Lahore
6 Lt Col. Khush Muhammad Library Incharge National Defence University
7 Muhammad Rafiq Awan Chief Librarian IUB, Bahawalpur
8 Mirza Waseem Baig Librarian EME – NUST
9 Muhammad Rafiq Acting Chief Librarian Inetrnational Islamic University
10 Pervez Irfan Acting Chief Librarian Quaid-e-Azam University
11 Naveed Ahmad Librarian PNRA
12 Muhammad Sajid Mirza Senior Librarian Inetrnational Islamic University
13 Sadaf Saeed Archive Officer Dunya TV
14 Humaira Khan Librarian NDC
15 Farasat Shafi ullah Librarian PakLAG/NUST
16 Umar Farooq Reference Specialist US-IRC
17 Maqsood Ahmad IT Professional LISolutions/IUB, Bahawalpur
18 Sher Afzal Librarian HITEC, Taxla
19 Zahid Iqbal Deputy Librarian Riphah International University
20 Azeem Khan Marwat Librarian/Asst Director FDE Colleges
21 Maqsood Ahmad Shaheen Reference Specialist US-IRC
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Award for best project during National Training on Library 2.0

Posted on August 26, 2009 by admin

An award was announced for the best small project during this training. All 15 participants created their own blogs and put the following elements on it.

1- Catalog (OPAC) – LibraryThing widget
2- Search – LibraryThing widget
3- IM – Meebo / AOL Widget
4- RSS Feeds

The blogs were judged on the basis of contents, effort, organization and presentation of blog.

The jury selected http://lib2zia.blogspot.com/ as the best blog created by Zia ur Rehman from State Bank of Pakistan, Karachi and received a shield from LISolutios. The other blogs can be accessed here:

180820091480
Mr. Rafiq Awan, Chief Librarian IUB, presenting shield to Mr. Zia ur Rehman (SBP, Karachi)

We again congratulate Mr. Zia ur Rehman on this achievement.

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National Training on Library 2.0

Posted on August 8, 2009 by admin


National Workshop on Library 2.0 and Training Need Assessment(TNA)

Note: Registration Closed

YR0Q6900 YR0Q6874 IMG_5536
YR0Q6892 YR0Q6893 180820091472

More Fotos : http://www.flickr.com/photos/lisolutions

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Implement Library 2.0 in your library today…

Posted on July 10, 2009 by Ata

Implementation of Library 2.0 in your library using Web 2.0 is as easy as 1 2 3… Yes!! Coz Free and Open Source Softwares are with you to implement it… Lets see how? Library 2.0 is all about the participation of your users / patron / customers in knowledge creating and knowledge management. This can achieve by following Web 2.0 services:

  • Blogs
  • RSS
  • Bulletin Boards
  • Social Networking
  • Tagging / Bookmarking
  • Twitter

BLOGS

BLOGS (Abb of Web Logs) are the ideas or short stories which you may want to share your users and may get there point of view in the form of contents. Start blogging in your library by creating your account at WordPress. It will not take more than 5 minutes. You can signup at http://en.wordpress.com/signup/ Another free Blogging service is Blogger, If you are Google lover then I would suggest to use Blogger at https://www.blogger.com/start (First you have to create a Gmail account, is it?)

RSS

RSS or Really Simple Syndication is Web 2.0 technology used to fetch the useful information from so many websites without opening them. This information directly comes in your client (I use Microsoft Outlook as RSS client). Many newsgroups like BBC, CNN, Jang, Dawn, etc offer RSS on their websites. Just visit their home page and locate this yellow color icon (I think color is not important) and copy the location of link into your RSS client.

Bulletin Boards / Forums

Forum is an other example of sharing information or knowledge with others. It is a little bit different from BLOG in nature. In BLOGS, you create or initiate a discussion but in forums, any registered user/member can start any topic and others can reply or post comments. There are many free forums softwares like phpbb, Simple Machines Forum (I personally recommend phpbb). Both are free and open-source. To start a Bulletin Board Free please visit http://www.getforum.org/

Social Networking

I believe most of us know it very well. Facebook, MySpace, Tagged, etc are the examples of Social Networking websites. Just join one of them (I recommend Facebook). Add your users in your friend list and create the page of your library for interaction with your friends / users.
There are so many libraries on Facebook like:

Charleston County Public Library
National Centre for Physics,Library
Waterville Public-Library, NY

Many libraries are using MySpace like:

Waterville Public Library
Denver Public Library Teens

Tagging / Bookmarking

We all know how to save a bookmark in Internet Explorer. But saving a bookmark online with tags/subjects is really a fun. What happens when you save bookmarks on your computer? The number of bookmarks increases day by day and after a few days you are not able to find the required bookmark when you need it. Similarly if you have saved your bookmarks in Internet Explorer / FireFox, these are saved in your local hard drive and you can not access them on other computers. You can not share them with your users/patrons.

The solutions is… Online Bookmarking and Tagging. You save your bookmarks on any online server and add some tags/subjects according to those bookmarks which can easily be found when you need them.

Now a days different links / Websites are being tagged by million/billion users, so you can find your required link easily.
Remember Library 2.0 core concept is by involving your users in knowledge management. So ask your users to put tags for you. Traditional Subject Heading Lists are not as effective as tags because according to “Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources, OCLC, 2005″, 84% typical topic search starts by a search engine with keyword/tag which is not associated to any Standard Subject Heading List

Even Librarians 2.0 are involving their users in cataloging and indexing process
I would suggest http://delicious.com for online bookmarking and tagging. Some public listings of these bookmarks and tags are as under:

Nicole Engard’s Bookmarks

NCP Library’s Bookmarks
Create your account at DELICIOUS and start Bookmarking and Tagging.

Note: Do not forget to make your bookmarks public for sharing with users

Twitter

According to Wikipedia, “Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read each others’ updates, known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters, displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to other users – known as followers – who have subscribed to them.”

As mentioned above, twitter is a very fast and effective way to share information/updates to your followers (Library Users). It can be used to push the updates in Current Awareness Service of your Library. Just create an account at twitter and start twittering.

Twitter is really a fun when used with your cell phone. Unfortunately this service (Cell phone connectivity) is not available in Pakistan right now. But you can use it by using third party service at isms.pk

Ata ur Rehman
ata.rehman@gmail.com

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Future of LAMP…… LAPP?

Posted on June 4, 2009 by Ata

Libraries all over the world are using free and open-source softwares due to a number of reasons. FOSS are really a blessings for librarians to provide the services to their users by using free and open source softwares in this digital area. FOSS are helping us in:

  • Browsing Internet (FireFox)
  • Creating and editing text files (Notepad++)
  • Searching Internet (Google- Google uses MySQL Database)
  • Social Networking (Facebook- MySQL is the choice as database in Facebook)
  • Integrated Library Systems (Koha, OpenBiblio, PhpMyBibli)
  • Digital Library Softwares (Greenstone, EPrints, DSpace)

Most of FOSS developers used to use LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl) framework for development. But now there is a “little” change (Although its effect is no more little).
First look on the following exerts from http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/sun-to-acquire-mysql.html website

“Sun Microsystems Announces Agreement to Acquire MySQL, Developer of the World’s Most Popular Open Source Database….”

Yes Sun is going to acquire MySQL and other news is from Sun Inc. Have a look at http://www.sun.com/third-party/global/oracle/

“On April 20, 2009, Sun and Oracle announced a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt.”

Now no one know what Sun Inc is going to do with MySQL. If there is any change in MySQL licensing, FOSS community will not have an important element of LAMP (I mean M for MySQL)

So can we say that Free and Open-Source Movement is on stake? … The answer is No because FOSS community is committed to make their way in every difficulty…. the alternative is PostgreSQL (http://www.postgresql.org/)
PostgreSQL is a world class free and open-source database and claims “The world’s most advanced open source database.”

Now the post MySQL scenario can be a little bit different. After the replacement of MySQL with PostgreSQL the LAMP platform may be changed to LAPP (Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL, PHP/Perl)…

Hope for the best….!!!

Further readings:

  1. http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/sun-to-acquire-mysql.html
  2. http://www.sun.com/third-party/global/oracle/
  3. Whither MySQL,Whither LAMP? by jOhN C. DvOrAk (PC Mag June 2009)
  4. http://blog.page2rss.com/2007/01/postgresql-vs-mysql-performance.html
  5. http://wskills.blogspot.com/2007/01/postgresql-vs-mysql-benchmark.html

Ata ur Rehman
ata.rehman@gmail.com

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Professor Dr. Kanwal Ameen ::: ::: Congratulations and Best Wishes

Posted on May 28, 2009 by Ata

As reported by Dr. Khalid Mahmood on a mailing group on May 27, 2009:

“I am pleased to share that Professor Dr. Kanwal Ameen has joined the Dept.
of Library & Information Science, Punjab University as Chairperson. I
welcome this appointment and pray for her success and betterment of this
department”

We congratulate Professor Dr. Kanwal Ameen on her appointment as new Chairperson of Department of Library and Information Science (DLIS). We pray for her success in future. May her appointment be helpful for betterment of the profession.

We also appreciate the efforts made by Dr. Khalid Mahmood for the promotion of this profession

Admin
LISolutions

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Custom Reports in Koha 3

Posted on May 4, 2009 by Ata

One of the benefits of Koha 3.0 is the availability of custom reports. Users can create and design their own reports providing the SQL in Koha 3.0 GUI format. It is a very simple to use wizard to create custom reports.
Just point your browser to /cgi-bin/koha/reports/guided_reports.pl and a wizard will ask you a series of questions and your desired report will be there.

Users can create their custom reports without wizard by entering SQL code. As Koha 3.0 has a dynamic and large active community working day and night for the development of new facilities in Koha, a few custom reports have already been designed and can be accessed here: http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=sql_library

To use these custom reports SQL Code, follow the following method:

1- Point your browser to: http://[host name]:[port]/cgi-bin/koha/reports/guided_reports.pl?phase=Create+report+from+SQL&submit=Create+report+from+SQL
2- Type Report Name and Notes
3- Select type from combo box
4- Copy and paste the code

yahooooooooo

Your new customized report is ready to use.

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Two day training at Islamia University, Bahawalpur

Posted on April 13, 2009 by Ata

A two day training was announced and conducted for the library professionals of The Central Library Bahawalpur and constituent libraries by LISolutions. The main objective of LISolutions is to “Excel the skills” of library professionals, through this extensive training to make them trained in serving the users/patrons most effectively.

The training theme was “Introduction to IT” . The detailed schedule of this training was published before one week. The following resource persons from LISolutions conducted the training:

  • Ata ur Rehman (Trainer)
  • Nausheen (Co-Trainer)

Twenty full time and part-time professionals attended this training. The main purpose of this training was to build a solid base for librarians for forthcoming intensive trainings on more advanced level like Information Storage and Retrieval, Surviving in Digital Age, Implementation of Library 2.0 in the age of Web 2.0, etc.

The following subtopics were covered by the Trainers in a very professional manners:

  • Basics of computers and Information Technology
  • A brief introduction to computer software, hardware, Operating System
  • Introduction to Debian Linux and Microsoft Windows (XP and Vista)
  • Advanced formatting by using Microsoft Word
  • Format your document by using heading styles
  • Use of reference tools (TOC, Index, Footnotes and End notes)
  • Auto-text, Auto Correct Options
  • Introduction to Microsoft PowerPoint and its usage in libraries
  • Master view of a slide and Header and Footer for slides in PowerPoint
  • Use of MS Excel for making spreadsheets.
  • Formulae and functions in MS Excel
  • A brief introduction of WWW and internet

The training was conducted in a very learning friendly atmosphere. Hands on training/learning was the major objective of this training.

Trainees took part in different assignments and activities with great interest which make this training more effective

Note: The lecture slides/reading material for this training can be downloaded at here

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Koha 3: Opportunities for Librarians

Posted on April 8, 2009 by Ata

The release of Koha 3 is not a new story and its popularity among the librarians of the world is increasing day by day due to its powerful framework, stability, ease of use and the flexibility to customize the different modules.

But according to our observation and discussion with professional librarians at Islamabad/Lahore, Pakistani librarians are hesitating to use it due to the following reasons:

  • Its Windows version is not available
  • Most of librarians are not trained to run Linux or Linux-based softwares
  • Skill set required to setup the software is not available in most of libraries
  • No serious action has been taken to promote Free and Open-Source Softwares in Pakistan
  • No infrastructure is available for trainings to use Free and Open-Source Softwares

Pakistani librarians can get the benefits of Koha 3 by learning Linux OS. LISolutions is preparing some trainings for the use of Koha 3 in near future. Our main focus will to highlight the main features of Koha and its usage for different segments of library community like librarians, patrons, teachers, administrators and other library stakeholders.

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Inpage to Unicode Converter — a wondorful software by a brilliant Pakistani student

Posted on April 2, 2009 by Ata

Salman Humdullah, BCS final semester student at FAST National University, Lahore is a very talented student. He developed a world class Inpage to Unicode Converter during his vacations after the exams of Intermediate in late 2003 when he was only 18 years old.

This software is free and can be obtained from the website of SHSoft here

You can download this from this direct link: http://lisolutions.org/downloads/index.php?act=view&id=61

We appreciate his efforts and contribution in the field of data conversion and wish for his bright future.

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