This post is from Thana, an Iraqi colleague who has shared in several training programs run by Simmons. She is currently in Chennai (formerly called Madras), India on a six-week training program. She writes:
After returning from Bangalore, we started classes again at 23th nov. It was raining heavily all this week, so we didn?t go out of the institute. Even our food was served in the guest house to not be wet.
We all start to work seriously on our project as we had no more time for us to finish it.
At 26th nov. our lecture was about the Future library by professor B. Ramesh Babu. It was so interesting a lecture, and we discussed the different kind of libraries – traditional library, automated library, digital library, virtual library, Hybrid Library. He focused on what skills are required for future Digital library. At evening, the same lecturer talked about web OPACs as an effective tool for information and retrieval.
The most important thing this week was visiting the central library of the Indian Institute of Teaching, Madras at 27th nov. Dr. Harish Chandran invited us to spend the day in the library. He is really wonderful and a wise librarian and well known in India. This visit was so interesting for us. We worked practically in the library – I loved working in circulation counter, as this is the 1st time for me to be librarian not teacher. After lunch we visited the computer center. It is the network operation center for this institute and you can get more information about it by using http://iihpce.iitm.ac.in.
The next week start at Monday 1st December. Our lecture this day was about Barcode, at evening we worked practically in bar-coding.
Tuesday 2nd Dec. we visited so many places , starting with visiting Madras Record, the main place for saving all government records in Madras (Chennai). There are 3 kinds of record – current records (it is still new that it only before 5 years); almost current records (less than 30 years); and non current records (after passing 30 years). It is a big place and contains a preservation department where many employees work on preserving records> We then went to visit a museum that had 4 buildings. The1st is for ancient India and they didn?t allow use of cameras; the 2nd is about natural history; the 3rd is for all kind of stones in India – I loved it that I can see emeralds and rubies in nature; and the 4th is for Art where we saw many art paintings by famous Indians.
For the next 2 days our lectures were about Green stone as a Digital library, and at evening we did practical work in how to create our on digital library by using green stone. It is so important for us, because all of us 27 partners in this training didn?t use green stone in our country. For me I heard about this for the 1st time, and I was hoping that we would work more in creating our library by green stone and leave working in project. I think almost of us know how to do a project but we no one had tried before to create our own digital library.
Friday 5th Dec. we got another interesting lecture about 2.0 library and blogs and how it is important to share with other librarians many thoughts and activities. By the way, all the lecturers and training partners know that I am sharing in Simmons blogs, so they keep read my blogs and they encourage me, and sometime when I introduce myself to a lecturer (we did that every day when a new lecturer came to class) he/she said ..ahh u are the blogger lady from Iraq??
Thank you for Simmons blog to offer me this chance and thanks to all who read my blogs!
Yours,
Thana