Proud to be a LIBRARIAN!!! Love the L-sign

MZINGWANE HIGH SCHOOL LIBRARY BURNS DOWNS TO ASHES http://www.chronicle.co.zw/mzingwane-library-burns-down-to-ashes/

Dr Hikwa's desire to take the library as we know it to the people saw one of the most amazing projects come of library land in Zimbabwe.....He was among the people that came up with the unique donkey-drawn mobile library. http://www.herald.co.zw/go-well-hikwa-you-did-us-proud/

A CHAMPION of rural libraries and former Dean of the National University of Science and Technology (NUST), Lawton Hikwa subscribed to the creation of a just society where libraries and information services were made available to all people, including rural communities, as a matter of right and not charity. http://www.southerneye.co.zw/2015/10/14/tribute-to-lawton-hikwa/  

Academic Hikwa dies. Prominent NUST Lecturer and political commentator Dr Lawton Hikwa has died. He was 50......  http://www.herald.co.zw/academic-hikwa-dies/

It's important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of members' interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. I'm going to tell you that libraries are important. I'm going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. I'm going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things. And I am biased, obviously and enormously: I'm an author, often an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For about 30 years I have been earning my living though my words, mostly by making things up and writing them down. It is obviously in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and help foster a love of reading and places in which reading can occur. http://www.theguardian...

Teaching information literacy to students has been a core service for academic and research libraries for decades. However in recent years it is now increasingly common for libraries to offer programs teaching researchers different kinds of information skills including how to track their research impact. Traditional librarian skills in teaching how to seek and interpret publications  are repurposed in this environment to teach researchers how to seek and interpret data about their publications including citation counts , research metrics such as h-indexes and altmetrics . http://interlibnet.org/2015/10/06/librarian-as-teacher-research-impact-tracking-services-for-researchers-and-academics/

When I was in library school I learned that information literacy is something that is taught in classes and seminars, by professional librarians to small or large groups of clients. While the content of information literacy training varied, what was made clear in the model I was presented with was that a client knew when they were being taught information literacy. However my first few jobs were in special libraries, in corporate environments. I found the difference between information literacy theory and practice very wide. Staff members, my clients, were not going to give 30 minutes or an hour of their time to ‘learn information literacy’ – not the least because they had been doing their jobs well before I came along, what did I have to teach them? http://interlibnet.org/2015/09/29/librarian-as-teacher-information-literacy-in-special-libraries-or-how-to-secretly-teach-people-things/

This Step by Step Guide (SbS), has been necessitated by the needs and concerns of the abcd community particularly in Zimbabwe and Sub-Saharan Africa for a simplified guideline of day to day operational processes and work flows.   abcd has a number of key result areas and core modules, which must be implemented in a systematic and standardised way.    This promotes continuation and excellent maintenance of abcd.   The best international guidelines and norms in open source have been consulted , but importantly drawing from Zimbabwean experiences and challenges. So the result is that we have a SbS Guide from a practical Zimbabwean experience, containing what is relevant and what works for our current situation. This SbS Guide will be updated regularly. This SbS Guide is a useful reference tool even for those with experience in workflows and processes for abcd. We hope it is the answer to your daily trouble-shooting worries. https://t.co/BwlKG...

ABCD Training in Tanzania https://www.facebook.com/groups/841467835944581/ The Sokoine National Agricultural Library (SNAL) in collaboration with the Innovative Agricultural Research Initiative (IAGRI) has org anised a training on ABCD Library Information Management System from 6th - 10 th July 2015. The training aimed at imparting knowledge to librarians and ICT personnel who are expected to pannel the system in their institutions. The training involved seven institutions : SUA (Morogoro), Mzumbe University (Morogoro), Jordan University College (Morogoro), College of African Wildlife management (CAWM-Mweka, Moshi), Nelson Mandela Institute of Science and Technology (NM-AIST, Arusha), Institute of Rural Development Planning (IRDP, Dodoma) and Muslim University of Morogoro. Amongst the topics covered were introduction and philosophy of ABCD, system installation and configuration of the modules, MARC-cataloging and copy/loanobjects creation, circulation modules etc. The training in...

Colleagues' i would like to share with you an active abcd user community in Zimbabwe, you can follow and join on the following link; https://www.facebook.com/groups/abcdzim/ Zimbabwean libraries have been manipulating abcd and the general ISIS technologies family since the early 90s. as follows CDS/ISIS DOS (most difficult for librarians) CDS/ISIS for Windows (winisis) wwwisis jisis abcd (integrated and not for the geek) we have held several skills transfer training at varying levels such as Operational and Technical. some of us have had the opportunity to be tutored by the ISIS technologies gurus such as Prof. Egbert de Smet and Peter Hessels at Eduardo Modhlane University Maputo Mozambique a couple of years back. some of us are still actively involved in abcd skills transfer for big institutions such as the Pedagogical University (UP) Mozambique in all its 11 provinces. some of us have gone to share this experience not only in Zimbabwe but some SADC...

Academic Movers 2015: In Depth with Hosea Tokwe In our most recent 2015 In-Depth Interview with  Library Journal  Movers & Shakers from academic libraries, sponsored by SAGE, we spoke with Hosea Tokwe . In 2007 Tokwe, at the time a senior library assistant at  Midlands State University  (MSU) in Kweru, Zimbabwe, was given two boxes of books bound for the Matenda Primary School in rural Zimbabwe, donated by former students. The difficulties he encountered in simply getting the books to Matenda inspired him to singlehandedly establish a library at the school—no small task, as Zimbabwe was in the midst of ongoing political and social unrest and his first forays into the rural community were met with mistrust. But Tokwe prevailed, convincing the school to convert a classroom into its first library in 2008, and—in addition to serving as chief library assistant in MSU’s special collections department—he has continued to work with outside groups to continue to fill ...

*Disseminating Information is Power--------Scholarship is a Conversation* Zimbabwe Library Association (Zimla) Transformation Agenda: a proposal... by Raymond Chibatamoto https://www.facebook.com/groups/zimla/permalink/10153007404787291/ About the author: Ray Chibatamoto graduated from Harare Polytechnic in 1993 with a National Diploma in Library and Information Sciences. He has worked in many library and documentation setups including the Supreme Court of Zimbabwe, The Southern Africa Research and Documentation Centre (SARDC), Harare City Library (formerly known as the Queen Victoria Memorial Library), The IUCN-The World Conservation Union (the world’s largest environmental NGO), and presently as a Consultant Librarian and an infopreneur. In his spare time he tends to look back on his career spoor, reflect on the future and write. In this paper I speak • from what I regard as the centre of myself; • from a point in total awareness of where my experience of the...

Going against the grain:Questioning the role of archivists & librarians in the documentation and preservation of Indigenous Knowledge http://www.ajol.info/index.php/esarjo/article/view/109981

Josh Hanagarne's The World's Strongest Librarian: A Memoir of Tourette's is his take on growing up as the son of a gold miner, experiencing a Mormon upbringing, battling Tourette's, and becoming a kettlebell-lifting librarian in Salt Lake City. He talked about the latter with Tip Sheet. When Publishers Weekly asked me to write a piece called How Becoming A Librarian Saved Me, I thought: Bottom of Form Saved from what? Saved for what? Salvation means different things to different people. I use two definitions for myself. The first comes from my sexy, two volume Oxford English Dictionary: Preservation from destruction, ruin, loss, or calamity. I’ve come to my second, personal, less official definition through my work at the library. The ability to tell my own story, articulately and honestly. I was in the staff area when my manager called me. “We have a patron who has a question for you,” she said. “I think you’re probably the o...