This summer I am spending over in Zambia with a christian mission agency CMS Ireland
At the college there is a network of computer's connected to the internet - a few things have been needed to be done.
Printing set up so that students can be given credits and once they are used up then they have to pay for any other printing - this has been set up using a system -papercut They also have, for developing countries a special educational licence which is well worth it - it takes about 1/2 day to set up but the instructions are pretty clear and straight forward - their technical support is great- very helpful online!
My next task was to sort out the library system - my background is in computer programming and especially websites - so I naturally turned to something which has already been designed - I looked at opensource options of PHPlibrary and MyLibrary however I have opted for openbiblio which has proved to be a great choice.
One needs to install a web server - I am using xampp which has Apache server, PHP Scripting and a MySQL database inbuilt again it is simply download it and do what it says
Then I downloaded openbiblio - very simple to install - follow the instructions and you'll be fine!
There a couple of plugins again these are crucial if you want to save yourself hundreds of hours of work - there is a plugin available for openbiblio for amazon and for the library of congress these take the information and stick it into the library database straight away. sooooo good.
A couple more things still to do on the techie side of the placement
- creation of a grade book for the college admin
- Setting up a windows server and the clients
- Creation of a basic guide for theological students
more info on those when it comes
