[Isis-users] First workshop on ABCD in India/Asia

[Rabisankar Giri]

The national workshop on ABCD has recently been held on May 26-29, 2011 in Birla Institute of Management and Technology (BIMTECH), India. This is the first workshop on ABCD in India even in Asia. The program is jointly organized by BIMTECH and Rangnathan Society for Social Welfare &Library Development (RSSWLD), supported by UNESCO and Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR). BIMTECH with RSSWLD has been organizing a series of knowledge building program on library science based on FLOSS philosophy. This is the fifth in this series. The previous workshops were on the two most popular FLOSS based ILMS [i.e., KOHA and NewGenlib(www.verussolutions.biz) ] in India.
 
This workshop on ABCD is unique in following sense
 

About 500 professionals were applied for participating in this workshop. This might be the first workshop for which such a huge application came. Only 50 participants were selected based on their prior experience with ILMS. All the participants were using either any ILMS software or ISIS family software.
 

India has 28 states and seven union territories (UT). Almost from each state and UT, at least one professional took participation in this workshop. Besides, professionals from neighboring countries of India like Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal Bhutan have also participated in this workshop.
 

The resource person for the workshop was none other than Prof. Egbert deSmet, University of Antwerp, Belgium, one of the developers of ABCD. 
 
Though in India, many of our librarian are using FLOSS based ILMS for managing activities and services of Library (e.g., http://nopr.niscair.res.in/handle/123456789/11555 , http://59.176.17.111/ , http://www.granthalaya.org/ ) but, few of us are aware about the development and possibilities with ABCD. Only a very few from India have made some progress with ABCD ( http://124.124.221.16/site/php/index.php ). 
 
Unless we attended Prof. Egbert’s workshop in BIMTECH, we could hardly know that we, the library professional can be truly empowered with the enormous possibilities with ABCD. In a real sense ABCD is truly open. In the four days workshop, he taught us every module of ABCD and gave us practical hands on experience with ABCD.
 
More than this, he has created a wave among the participants with the idea of innovativeness and unlimited possibilities of ABCD. As OSS evangelist, many of us are coping everyday with the issue of data conversion because of variegated underlying structure of different ILMS databases. When he showed us the power mx command and ABCD in data conversion, we were really spell bound.
In simple, Prof. Egbert has just thrown us into a FLOSS knowledge ocean  giving only a tiny but powerful ABCD to tide over by igniting our mind. Many of us thus, have already started exploring the ABCD and need the extended collaboration form the ABCD forum family. We also need many of such workshops in different parts of India by experts on ABCD at some gap to contribute positively to the ABCD family.
ABCD also needs to be fully UNICODE compliant at earliest to make it more popular in India as the other two popular ILMS in India namely KOHA and NewGenLib have already did that.
 
Rabishankar Giri
Indira Gandhi Institute of Technology
GGS Indraprastha University
http://www.ipu.ac.in/igit/about.html

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