From July 16 ? 20, under the guidance of Pat Oyler and Atlantic Philanthropies, Patrick and Terry led an IT seminar for the IT staff of the Learning Resource Centers (LRCs). The seminar was held in the LRC in Hue, and was attended by seven IT staff from the Can Tho LRC, six from the Information Resource Center (IRC) and the LRC in Da Nang, five from Thai Nguyen, and seven IT staff members from Hue. The seminar was titled, ?Sharing IT Experience: US Libraries and Vietnam LRCs? and the goals were to enhance the role of IT in furthering the mission of the LRCs, and to develop realistic plans for IT development of services in the LRCs.
From Monday through Thursday, the seminar covered a number of library IT related topics; including workstation services and security (e.g., Ghost, anti-virus, Deep Freeze), remote access (e.g., VPNs, proxy servers, and active directory authentication), open source (e.g., Code4lib), digital libraries (e.g., Greenstone), ILS integration (e.g., z39.50 and interlibrary loan), elearning (e.g., Moodle), and various web 2.0 technologies (wikis, blogs, etc.). The final day was spent writing action plans for each LRC, and two plans for technologies that span more than one LRC. The LRCs are in very different situations: the Thai Nguyen LRC is just being built now, whereas some of the other LRCs are mature and well-integrated into the university, with over 20,000 student cards issued.
The action plans included several for the implementation of the Moodle learning management system, digital libraries using Greenstone, a web portal, a VPN, and other plans and projects. The seminar seemed to go well, and we learned much from the LRC IT staff. It is likely that the LRCs will implement elearning courses and digital collections in the near future.