In August, 2011 students at the Documentation Research & Training Centre of the Indian Statistical Institute, at the Bangalore Centre (DRTC) will be using LibLime Academic Koha as part of their coursework. DRTC is a premier library science school in India, founded by father of library science in India, Dr. S.R.Ranganathan. DRTC offers 2 year M.S. program in library and information science.
Students in Professor K. S. Raghavan’s “Cataloging Theory and Practice” course will have access to their own production ILS to assist them in completing their coursework.

LibLime will provide the class, Professor Raghavan, and his assistant, Pradeep Balaji B., with a hosted installation of LibLime Academic Koha, free of charge. Students will have full cataloging access in the cataloging module, including MARC Bibliographic records, MARC Holdings records, and item records. They will be able to create their own set of collection codes, location codes, and item types. They will create actual working records for discovery access in the OPAC.

“I would like to thank LibLime team very much for this generous Koha with Class program, which would go a long way in training and learning among us in the institute,” said Pradeep Balaji B. “Cataloguing Theory & Practice paper is part of the course for the first year M.S. Library and Information Science Students. In this course, I assist Prof. K.S. Raghavan in practice sessions. My classes are planned to familiarize the students with MARC and AACR2 cataloguing codes. With Koha getting more popular in India as free ILMS with its amazing features of support of Unicode-compliance for Indic script, superior cataloguing module of creating records, importing records from other cooperatives, it would be more beneficial for the students, learning by a live demonstration than manual practice. The classes for this paper will be held from August till November, 2011.

LibLime's Koha with Class program is designed to give library school faculty a chance to embed the use of an ILS into their coursework and curricula. Students gain practical experience with library automation software as they prepare to enter the library workforce. LibLime provides free support for these Koha with Class installations, and already there are dozens of faculty members throughout North America taking advantage of this program. LibLime is looking to expand the program overseas to support librarianship at an international level.

To learn more about the program visit - http://www.liblime.com/we-give-back.