REPORT: 2-DAYS TRAINING WORKSHOP FOR LIBRARY PROFESSIONALS

 Library Information Services, CIIT Lahore has organized 2-days Training / Workshop on August 6-7, 2014 entitled “BE ASKILLED LIBRARIAN”. Twenty Five library professionals from different institutes were participated in the training. The contents were MS Office, DSpace, Time Management, LIBGUIDES and CUONline-LIMS. The presenters were Tariq Najmi, Library Incharge CIIT Lahore, Saima Qutab, Director Design Library, University of Dammam, KSA and Mansoor Sheraz, Software Engineer, CIIT-Lahore.

In the first two sessions, Mr. Tariq Najmi adopted “Learning by Doing” methodology and participants did hands on practice for MS Excel and Office.Participants explored those areas of MS office, which the usually  ignore  during  their  routine  work  like  text alignment, replace tab, auto indexing and auto table of contents and macros. In MS Excel, participants explored the unique features like formulas, pivot table, Marcos, and graphs. All participants were very much excited to learn the different features of MS office which they usually ignored. In last two sessions of the first day, Ms Saima Qutab gives her presentation on Time Management and LibGuides. LibGuides  is  new  phenomena  for  Pakistani  librarians  and  the participants took great interest in these presentations. CIIT Lahore Library has the distinction of working on LibGuides since last two years. Both presentations by Saima Qutba was very informative and edifying.

On the second day, participants installed DSpace and learn how to configure Dspace. They also develop collection and communities and manage their administrative account in Dspace software. Tariq Najmi was the presenter for this session and he presented a good presentation on Dspace followed by hands on practice. In the last session, Mr Mansoor Sheraz gave presentation on CUOnline-LIMS and talked about different features of this integrated software.

All the sessions were very successful and participants took great interest to learn the contents of the workshop. Dr. Mahmood Ahamd Farooqui, Incharge Dual Degree Program was the Chief Guest of the concluding ceremony and distributed the certificates among all participants. He in his concluding remarks said that library has its own history as long as class and only those library professionals who have latest skills can compete with the current challenging era. In last Tariq Najmi thanked all the participants for their interest in workshop, library staff for wonderful arrangements, CS department to provide the venue for the workshop and COMSATS Lahore particular Dr. Mahmood Ahmad Bodla for encouragement and approval because without this the workshop was not be possible.