UNESCO recently hosted a one day workshop on CDS/ISIS, UNESCOs software for database management, as a follow-up to the 2nd World CDS/ISIS Congress held recently in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil.
At the workshop that was held on 20 October 2005 Alfred Gumbwa, Senior Documentalist at the Southern Africa and the Southern African Development Community (SARDC) and Stephen OBrien, UNAIDS, Zimbabwe, who participated at the Bahia Congress with UNESCOs support, debriefed the some 20 participants from Government, NGOs, universities and public libraries on the Congress.
Underscoring the importance of UNESCOs contribution to cataloguing and classification of documents through CDS/ISIS, demonstrated by the use of CDS/ISI by 90% of the libraries in Zimbabwe, they stressed that that CDS/ISIS needs continuous support, for example by actively contributing to the ongoing national ICT policy deliberations and by lobbying government to support freeware and open source software.
CDS/ISI activities in Zimbabwe are coordinated by the Zimbabwe ISIS User Group Zimisis, a voluntary grouping of librarians, documentalists and institutions using CDS/ISIS software for database management. The user group holds workshops at least twice a year.
The Second World Congress of users, developers and distributors of CDS/ISIS celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the launch of the first programme. Gathered in Salvador de Bahía, Brazil (20-23 September 2005) 183 persons from 39 countries, exchanged their views and signed a declaration.
Source:UNESCO
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