DSpace in Iraq?

I've been reading around the IT aspects of reconstruction in Iraq, and 
came across a mention of DSpace in the background slides for a
(cancelled) meeting about the establishment of an "Internet 
informational network for Iraq's institutes of HE and research".

http://www.escwa.org.lb/information/iraq/IPR/main.html
http://www.escwa.org.lb/information/iraq/workshops/13apr/onlinereourcesv1.0.pdf

I've swapped brief emails with Sara Al-assam, one of the authors of that
document. It sounds to me as if DSpace is worth investigating in that
context, so I thought I'd drop a note here to see if anyone might have
time/energy to help with use of DSpace in Iraq. Since the tools are
opensource, they could just grab them and get started, but I expect that 
assistance of various kinds would be useful and welcomed. 

Ah, it seems I didn't know about the dspace-general and dspace-tech lists. 
Maybe I ought've asked there, but I'm more used to this list. If
anyone's interested in following this up, do get in touch...

I guess the initial practicalities to investigate are the extent of
internationalisation support in DSpace (Arabic text ok?), and the
ability to localise messages etc., in the UI. I understand from 
http://www.dspace.org/implement/sys-man.html that a certain amount of
local  systems support is also typically needed; I'm wondering what additional 
(technical) issues might be encountered if using this in Iraq.

cheers,

Dan

ps. if I should be treating www-rdf-dspace as "the SIMILE list" now, let
me know; I could get http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-dspace/ 
updated with pointers to other fora too...

Received on Wednesday, 19 May 2004 14:22:47 UTC