The Pilot Project of Kenya Library Association

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Revision as of 14:37, 17 January 2007

Kenya Library Association (KLA) is an organisation of professional Kenyan librarians and information specialists.

Concept

A first conference of library and information professionals (LIS), held at WSF IV in Mumbai 2004, resulted in the idea that LIS and their associations should take an active part in the social forum process(es). This conference was arranged by Network Institute for Global Democratization (NIGD), which is a member of the WSF-IC, and Indian LIS. The then chair of International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), Ms Kay Raseroka participated in the conference. She urged all librarians to start collecting, preserving and diseminating the information, which is generated by the WSF, in the public libraries of the various countries.

Our goal is to create a permanent link between the Social Forum and the Library, thus building the continuity of the social forum's process by extending it to one of society's basic and universal institutions.

Initiating KLA's pilot project on 'Documenting the WSF in Libraries (2006)

At the polycentric WSF in Bamako, a number of LIS, including the secretary of Kenya Library Association (KLA), Ms Esther Obachi, and Ms Mary Wanjohi, who work at the Nairobi university, attended a workshop, which decided to take the idea further with, in particular, the Nairobi WSF in view. Esther Obachi, on behalf of the KLA, wrote a proposal to the Finnish Embassy in Nairobi, and acquired funding for a 3-day "Training the trainers" workshop. The Finnish Embassy later also agreed to support the emerging pilot project on the documenting of the Nairobi WSF from its fund for local co-operation.

The "training of trainers" workshop took place in Nairobi 3-5 July 2006. The workshop was a crash-course on the globalisation of information and the Social Forum process, including lectures by e.g. Shiraz Durrani (Metropolitan University, London), Mikael Böök (NIGD, Finland) and Oloo Onyango from the WSF 2007 organizing committee. The workshop participants also had some basic training in journalism, blogs and wikis, and they started to compile a "manual" on howto carry out the documenting of the WSF information in libraries.

Follow-up workshops were then arranged by the KLA and the "trainers" in Kampala (December) and Daressalaam (3-5 January 2007). A last training event before the Nairobi WSF will be held on Friday 19 January near the Moi Sports centre in Kasarani. All in all, 60 of the Kenyan, Ugandan and Tanzanian LIS who will have attended the training workshops will attend, and to participate in the Nairobi WSF. The pilot project and its background is covered in Information for Social Change 24 which is a special issue on Libraries and Information in the World Social Forum Context. The issue can be downloaded from [1]