[Isis-users] ABCD Training in Tanzania

[De Smet Egbert]

Dear colleagues,

The Sokoine National Agricultural Library (SNAL) in collaboration with the Innovative Agricultural Research Initiative (IAGRI) has organised a training on ABCD Library Information Management System from 6th - 10 th July 2015. The training aimed at imparting knowledge to librarians and ICT personnel who are expected to pannel the system in their institutions. The training involved seven institutions : SUA (Morogoro), Mzumbe University (Morogoro), Jordan University College (Morogoro), College of African Wildlife management (CAWM-Mweka, Moshi), Nelson Mandela Institute of Science and Technology (NM-AIST, Arusha), Institute of Rural Development Planning (IRDP, Dodoma) and Muslim University of Morogoro.
Amongst the topics covered were introduction and philosophy of ABCD, system installation and configuration of the modules, MARC-cataloging and copy/loanobjects creation, circulation modules etc. The training involved practical hands-on experience which makes the participants to understand more the training given.
There have been some challenges during the training, the main one was the problem of installing ABCD on some Windows 64-bits laptops due to some newly arised incompatibilities of the new Apache2.4 and PHP.
The training has empowered both the librarians and ICT-technicians to get used with ABCD and understanding how the system can be linked with other systems to import records from other libraries, something which assists librarian to maintain international standards in bibliographical information such as MARC, CEPAL et. using Z39.50. On the other hand the system simplifies the work of data-migration from other Integrated Library Systems. Increasingly ABCD hast taught us that the system does not require librarieans to possess all programming skills in order to use it. Likewise, ABCD has proved to be much capable in storing and searching not only bibliographic data but also Institutional Repositories such as for theses of students in PDF, wich can assist in information sharing among higher learning and research institutions in comparison with e.g. Greenstone.

Now the idea is to set up a network of ABCD-users in the Morogoro region of Tanzania in order to share all good and bad experiences and learn from them. E.g. the catalogs are now available from each other's ABCD sites as a first visible result. 

The training has been indeed useful especially in bringing to light the flexibility of ABCD. However more training will be needed in order to allow librarires and other information institutions to fully benefit from the system.

Egbert de Smet
Universiteit Antwerpen