Webinar - OpenBiblio: Software to Digitize Small and Rural Libraries

ABOUT THE RESOURCE

TYPE:

Webinar

PRESENTER:

Zargaryan, Tigran, Garibashvili, Irakli

DATE:

December 2012

DOCUMENT LANGUAGE:

English

OTHER LANGUAGES:

OpenBiblio, an open source integrated library management system of particular interest to small libraries with limited technical expertise and resources of less than 50,000 volumes.

OpenBiblio is based upon MARC21 record format but any compatible format records may be imported (the session also mentioned MarcEdit, free software for helping to get records into a format suitable for importing). OpenBiblio contains modules for OPAC, circulation, cataloguing, administration and reporting from the database. It has been translated (localised) into Spanish and Armenian and is distributed under the GNU General Public License, meaning it can be freely used and shared by anyone. It is used widely, for example by regional and municipal libraries in Armenia and by primary schools in Chile.

This webinar gives an overview of OpenBiblio. The first speaker is Tigran Zargaryan, Director of the National Library of Armenia and also EIFL-FOSS Coordinator for Armenia. He led a project for the EIFL-FOSS Programme in 2011 to roll out OpenBiblio to small and rural libraries in Armenia.

The second speaker, Irakli Garibashvili, the EIFL-FOSS Coordinator for Georgia, reports on his work using OpenBiblio with both public and academic small libraries in Georgia, as well as how he used OpenBiblio to introduce the very concept of Integrated Library Systems (ILS) software to libraries who had never used one before, because OpenBiblio is so easy to use and understand.