Memory of the World Programme and Digital Heritage Subregional Training course in Bishkek

12 August 2004

12-13 August, 2004: Sub-regional workshop training in using the UNESCO software 'Sub-Regional MOW Register' (Memory of Central Asia) for the National Committees of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan for the Memory of the World Programme.

Representatives of the MOW National Committees of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan participate in the event. The workshop training is designed to raise capacity of the national committees’ members to work in a common working platform in the cyberspace in order to promote Central Asian documentary heritage, exchange information, knowledge and experience relating to the MOW activities within Central Asia, expand it to Asia and Pacific, and establish tool for nomination of the documentary heritage. The workshop training agenda include the following:

Presentation: MOWCA register software as collaborative tool for the MOW national committees and developing of next version of MOWCA Register software based on the recommendations of the workshop training participants;

Development of recommendations: on cooperation of the national committees in the field of building the common Central Asian Register;

Exercise: Building of common register in cyberspace for Central Asian MOW peoples and nominations.

MOWCA website: Improvement of the existing common news page on MOW in Central Asia. http://www.unesco.kz/mow.

Free discussion: based on proposals from the participants By the end of the workshop training the participants be able to use the MOWCA software, including: adding nominaitons; editing; adding images; publishing on Internet

List of participants:

Ms. Alla Aslitdinova, Director of the Scientific Library of the Academy of Science of Tajikistan; Chairman of the Tajikistan MOW National Committee;

Ms. Aiman Nasyrova, Director of the Republican Scientific and Pedagogical Library of the Ministry of Education and Science of Kazakhstan; Representative of the Kazakhstan MOW National Committee;

Mr. Marat Rakhmatullaev, Head of the Department of the Navoi National Library of Uzbekistan, Executive Director of Library Association of Uzbekistan; Representative of the Uzbekistan MOW National Committee;

Mr. Jumaliev Ulanbek, Secretary of the Kyrgyzstan MOW National Committee; the organizer of the workshop training;

Ms. Nina Maigulakova, Director of the Central State Archive for Cinema photo phono documents of Kyrgyzstan;

Mr. Fyodor Bakalov, Representative of the National Library of Kyrgyzstan; Representative of the Kyrgyzstan MOW National Committee.

Outcomes of the workshop training:

The following mission objectives were reached:
The workshop training on application of the MOWCA software for the national and the Central Asian Memory of the World (MOW) Registers was conducted on 12-13 August, 2004 for the members of the National MOW Committees of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Achieved results:

The participants learned to use the MOWCA software;

National MOW registers for Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan were filled with nominations;

Recommendations on improvement of the MOWCA software and the ‘MOW in Central Asia’ website were elaborated;

List of e-mail addresses to be included into the common mailing list of the Central Asian MOW National Committees’ Network was compiled;

Such issues as fund-raising for the purpose of preserving documentary heritage and providing access to it, as well as other issues were discussed with the workshop training participants on 13 August, 2004:

Ms. Aiman Nasyrova shared the experience of Kazakhstani librarians in the field of fund-raising. In particular, she shared information on the cooperation between the National Library of Kazakhstan and the Kazkommertsbank and IBM in the field of digitalization of the library collections and on the experience of the Republican Scientific and Pedagogical Library of the Ministry of Education and Science of Kazakhstan;

Ms. Alla Aslitdinova presented the experience of Tajikistan libraries in the field of fund-raising and as an example of fruitful activities of the libraries presented the CD-ROMs ‘Language and People’ and ‘Oldenburg: Rare Books Preservation Project in the Academy Library of Tajikistan’;

Mr. Marat Rakhmatullaev shared information on the experience of Uzbekistan libraries in the field of fund-raising;

Mr. Fyodor Bakalov made speech on the activities of the national Library of Kyrgyzstan.

By the end of the workshop training the participants developed the following recommendaitons on improvement of the MOWCA software:

provide separate completion of the nomination form when each field is completed on a separate page
divide the Russian and the English parts
enlarge the size of the fields
divide private and public records
provide with reference information for the fields
remove displaying of error notice suring adding\editing records if not all fields are completed(correctness of the records should be checked during adding or edtiting)
provde with the possibility of nominations exports(PDF,RTF,DOC, ETC)
after leaving the page the notice "you have leaved the Register" and link "Home" should be displayed
fix the error with adding backslashes before quotation marks ("")
after submition of the edited nominations go to page of nominations review with display of notification about successful completion of the form
develop the system of sorting nominations in the list
provide with search engine (search on key words in the fields)
add date with the help of DROPDOWN MENU
add flags of each country in the list of nominations
make Russian and English versions (add language switch)
translate errors into Russian (language of errors depends on the field language)