(Guest blog post from Abdrahamane Anne of the Library of the Faculty of Medicine Pharmacy and Dentistry, University of Bamako, Mali. This is the first of the workshops to take place in the eIFL-FOSS Skills and Tools Workshops initiative.)

Behind the Scenes

From 18 May to 22 May 2009, COMBI, the Malian Library Consortium, organized its first capacity building workshop on FOSS for librarians. This was the first in a series of 3 workshops whose objectives are to give librarians the skills needed to maintain a web site using the SPIP content management system (CMS) and to manage a library using the PMB integrated library system (ILS). A prerequisite for these is knowledge of PHP and MySQL - hence the importance of this first workshop in the series. Sponsored by the eIFL-FOSS small grant Skills and Tools initiative, the workshop was organized in partnership with eIFL.net, Reseau Malien de Documentation pour le developpement (REMADOC), Association Malienne des utilisateurs de Linux, and the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie, Bamako Office.

There were 16 people in the workshop (14 librarians and 2 IT persons) from public, academic and scientific libraries.  The 5 day workshop programme covered HTML (1 day), MySQL (2 days), PHP (2 days).

In his introduction to the workshop, the trainer pointed out:
"You've certainly come across web pages whose filename extension is php. When you look at the source code though in your web browser, you see only html tags and content text. So you need to remember 3 things :

• Your browser displays only html, so the server sends only html to your browser

• To handle php files, on the server side you need 3 pieces of software 1) a mysql database server, 2) a php engine and 3) an Apache webserver .  MySQL stores the data,  Apache talks to the web browser, and PHP is the bridge between Apache and MySQL.

• To develop php/mysql pages you need to know the following languages : HTML, PHP, SQL. SQL is used to save data or pull it out from the database, PHP is used to process data, and HTML is used to format and present data to visitors.
  

Here we are going to learn about each of these languages."

The workshop methodology had each participant using a computer running Ubuntu Linux. Participants used the Gnome Text Editor (gedit) for editing html and php files, and the shell terminal to connect to a  MySQL database.

Instead of using slide presentations, the trainer distributed keynotes and a set of exercises consisting of different tasks to accomplish. A typical question from participants was, "Why is there no space between the last name and the first name?". This kind question arose several times. After successfully performing a task, participants were encouraged to try to move on to the next task or make the previous task more complicated. These questions illustrate that the participants were following and understanding what was being said and also that they are curious and want to learn more than what is being given.

We distributed a CD-ROM containing some useful software and documentation: WamServer, notepad++, Firefox, SPIP, and PMB.

During the workshop we took few minutes to present eIFL.net to the participants. While browsing through eIFL.net website we presented different eIFL.net programmes and activities. Special emphasis was put on eIFL-FOSS and the list of electronic resources in French.

"Five days are not enough," was the general remark during the debrief afterwards. That's true since we could not perform all planned tasks and exercises and were forced to adjust consequently. Even though some participants learnt more and understood better than others, all of them got the main point and now understand what is going on behind the scenes when we visit (or request) a php web page.

Abdrahamane Anne
Bamako, Mali

[editor - for an additional report on this workshop in French, see the following Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie page.]