(Guest blog post from Ronald Munatsi, Coordinator, College & Research Librairies Consortium (CARLC), and Principal Librarian, Zimbabwe Parliament Library.)

FOSS – Ultimate solution for libraries in Africa

I had the privilege of attending this year's IST-Africa Conference in Kampala, Uganda from 4-8 May 2009 courtesy of eIFL.net. Supported by the European Commission under the Information Communication Technologies (ICT) Theme of FP7, IST-Africa 2009 was the fourth in an Annual Conference Series bringing together presenters and delegates from leading commercial, government & research organisations around the world, to bridge the Digital Divide by sharing knowledge, experience, lessons learnt and good practice. Presentations were on the following themes: Digital content and knowledge management, Technology Enhanced Learning,  ICT Skills Development,  ICT for eInclusion, eAccessibility,  eInfrastructures,  Networked Enterprise, eGovernment, and eHealth. I presented my paper under the Digital Content theme titled “Towards Cohesive Consortia Organisation and Smart Partnerships: Enabling Sustainable Access and Effective Utilisation of e-Resources in Academic and Research Libraries in Zimbabwe.”

Here I will focus on the FOSS aspects of the event. Presentations on FOSS ranged from Open Source Community Organization, to Using FOSS as a tool for development, to the Value of FOSS to academic and business models among others. These and other full-text papers presented during the conference will be available for down download from the IST-Africa portal paper repository. During FOSS discourses, it was unequivocal that FOSS applications particularly in libraries in transitional countries was the ultimate solution in narrowing the digital divide.

There was serious lobbying and advocacy for use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) as opposed to proprietary software and it was heartening to observe that eIFL-FOSS and eIFL-OA initiatives in this regard were noted in some discussions. Such FOSS applications as Greenstone, KOHA, ABCD were given as viable solutions. Another notable observation  was the trend towards social networking tools that allow collaborative content generation and management epitomised in library 2.0 (Web 2.0) services as these bring immense benefits to the library and the consumers of information resources.  These gains include researchers benefiting from collaborative peer-generated scientific research content which in turn adds value to online information resources. Librarians at the same time profit from rich collaborative cataloguing and metadata management among a host of other benefits but underpinning all this is a user-driven transformation of library services.

It is in this regard that I want to urge the eIFL-FOSS and eIFL-OA community to start seriously considering the use of these library 2.0 tools for example blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, twitters, mashups, social tagging, taxonomies among a host of other social media. Incidentally, the next IST-Africa conference (2010) will be held in Cape Town, South Africa. It will be focusing on the following thematic priorities:

• Open Source Software – Applications
• Digital libraries and Intelligent Content
• Technology enhanced Learning & ICT skills
• ICT for eInclusion and eAccessibility
• ICT for environmental sustaibability
• eGovernment – Services to Citizens & Business
• eHealth – Health Information Systems

Prior to the IST-Africa Conference for 2010, there will be an e-skills summit again in Cape Town (11-14 August 2010) and this will include plenary sessions on the preparatory process, academic and case study papers, e-skills exposition to display and demonstrate e-skills applications and a program of latest approaches to e-skills. I am sure  this can also be another opportunity to showcase and demonstrate such innovations as Greenstone including other initiatives for example integrating Greenstone with other systems like KOHA, ABCD social media and other tools.

Ronald Munatsi
Coordinator, College & Research Librairies Consortium (CARLC)
Principal Librarian
Zimbabwe Parliament Library