I was recently invited to write a guest post about my experience as a member of the 199th chapter of ISACA Chaper recently launched in Ibadan, Nigeria.

You can read about my post here

For many of us in the developing countries, access to world class education is something you just dream about, because the cost is way beyond the average individual.

 The Internet has helped to at least provide much more accessible knowledge, but the current wave of free online courses offered by world class faculty is really a boon to the individual who wants to acquire world class education, but has no financial capability to do so.

 Coursera (www.coursera.org) is one of those free online sites where you can get to audit full and free courses, offered by leading universities all over the world. I got to know about coursera about 4 months ago and I am currently taking my third course there. I found out that the courses I have done are delivered in such a way that the topics are very clear and easy to follow, though you still have to dedicate time, if you do want to be successful.

 I am currently doing the course "An Introduction to Interactive Programing in Python", and just in the second week I am so excited. I had wanted to learn a programming language for so long, but found several books and online resources either so hard or not interesting enough to keep at it. But writing a mini game in python in just a week blew my mind away. For the first time I wrote a program which did something and it worked. The teachers are actually interested in you understanding the course, which is a far cry from what is obtained in most institutions here in Nigeria.

 I have enjoyed coursera and I would be able to complete the python course and go on to be really proficient in the language. The major drawback for most of us here is the poor and usually expensive (relatively) Internet access in Nigeria. The courses are delivered with video and most ISPs here struggle with video streaming. Downloading offline is the best choice, but again you need access to a reasonable speed Internet access. I do encourage you to take a look at coursera.

 You may find that what you need to learn is just a click away. Coursera website is www.coursera.org

I recently discovered a fantastic website with great video tutorials of secondary school (K12) maths. And I wonder, that despite my many years of surfing and browsing and searching on the Internet, I still discover new stuffs on the web regularly.

According to Khanacademy "With a library of over 2,400 videos covering everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and 125 practice exercises, we're on a mission to help you learn whatever you want, whenever you want, at your own pace." And I can attest to the quality of all the video that I have downloaded and watched so far from the site. It is amazing how Sal (Founder, Khan Academy) dedicated his time to do this and I am saying a big thank you to Sal and his team for giving this gift to the world.

As some one who struggled in my early school years until I had a teacher who taught maths in a way for me to understand the logic, khanacademy maths videos really brings out the simplicity and the logic in maths. This is a site parents should visit with their children and watch and/or download the topics their children are struggling with in maths.

And if you like brain teasers, (like I do) you will find some couple of interesting ones on the site too.

Oh, the website address? www.khanacademy.org

The best things in life are free. There is nothing like a free lunch. These are two maxims you hear often. And the truth is … both are true. I have a lot of free stuffs I have downloaded over the Internet in the past years, but the Internet access is paid for. However like I usually tell my friends, you have paid for the Internet access, why don’t you maximise the “Returns on your Investment”

To help you do that I am writing about 3 websites I have found very useful to get free e-books.

1. Project Gutenberg. (www.gutenberg.org)

My favorite is Project Gutenberg. Here you will find a lot of books that are out of copyright in different formats including pdf, html, mobi(for kindles) and even text files. I have found on this site several books that I even have the hard copy. It has a nice search interface and also list of popular books by downloads. According to its website as at the time of this writing, there well over 36,000 books on their website.

2. Many Books. (www.manybooks.net)

This is another website offering over 29,000 free e-books. The books are categorized by genres, authors, titles and languages. You could also browse the most popular titles and recommendations. The site’s front page usually carries “Books of the week”, which is an incentive to visit at least once a week. 

3. The online books page. (onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu)

Unlike the earlier two sites, this site is more of a catalogue as it indexes over a million free e-books on the Internet. The listings follows a typical academic library format, using the Library of Congress subject headings. This is however not surprising as the site is hosted by a university. For libraries seeking to build a digital library, the site is worth dedicating some time to.

If you are like me and get addicted to building  an e-book library, you need a way to manage your collection. I recommend the excellent calibre e-book management software, which is also free and can be downloaded here.

Some few months back, a librarian in a University here in Nigeria had asked me whether there is a stop gap library package she could use to keep records of her library's holdings pending the time her management will approve the implementation of Koha. The idea is to have entered the holdings as they are acquired rather than do them in retrospective later. I advised her to get a Microsoft Access Database setup that could be exported as text with a view to converting to Marc and uploading to Koha later.

But two weeks ago I discover BookDB2, called by its author a Book Database and librarian. It is supposed to be a personal library management software that allows you to keep a record of your personal book holdings and also manages borrowers. In the Author's words...

"BookDB is a simple yet powerful database tool which will help you keep track of your book collection. You can create and edit publishers, authors and categories then add books using a simple entry screen. The latest version also allows you to import your books from a text file, in case you've already got them in another program."

It supports import from a text file and from Librarything. So it's nice if you want an offline management of your books when Internet Access is not available. (Very common in my clime here in Nigeria)

More importantly is that you can export out your books out in a csv text file that you cam massage to get it into Marc using MarcEdit. So rather than bothering with Access Database you could use BookDB in a pinch for a small / young library pending upgrading to a more elaborate setup like Koha.

I will be posting a brief review/tutorial on BookDB soon.So watch this space! And did I mention that BookDB is absolutely free? You can get it at www.spacejock.com

I usually deploy Koha for Library Management System and DSpace for Digital Repositories. The big question usually is how to search both systems at once (federated search) from a single interface. I have read about different solutions, including Blacklight, dbwiz and Vufind

Recently, I took a look at Vufind, and installed it on Debian Squeeze. To install Vufind, I followed the documentation here. I configured Vufind to index Koha and DSpace following the very good documentation efforts by the folks at Brac University (pdf).

I had 2 major issues during the configuration and testing. The first was that I could not view the details page for records imported into Vufind from DSpace. I joined and posted the issue on the mailing list of Vufind and I received pointers towards the solution. The problem happened to come from my installation of DSpace rather than Vufind.

The second issue was that description of items was not showing up in the Vufind details page. I posted this on the mailing list again and Demian Katz, one of the lead developers, responded that it was a bug and that he will do a patch before the week ends. To my surprise a few hours later, I got a mail saying the issue has been patched. I applied the patch and hey presto, my descriptions appeared in the right places.

This kind of support in the Vufind community reminds me of the kind of Support on the Koha community, and has encouraged me to keep on poking at Vufind to discover its hidden treasures.

So far I have been able to get records from my DSpace, Koha and the Project Gutenberg into my Vufind installation. What I am working on now it to use aperture for full text indexing of pdf documents through Vufind.

And this is a big thank you to the Koha, Vufind, DSpace and the open source community at large for the wonderful work being done to bring great tools to everyone.

Keep a date with me on this Blog to learn about my adventures with Vufind.

Open Source rocks!