Sudan libraries: It's time to change

One thing I feel embarrassed about is the fact that I can easily count how many times I went to the library at college, well … they aren’t that many!! But when I came to see the reasons behind that, I find out it was the library's fault. OK, maybe I played a small part of that , but still,  the library wasn't organized that well.

One of the major issues our library suffered from, (among most of the libraries in Sudan) is the lack of a computerized system to help its users, as my school library was running manually 100%. Of course running a library manually impacts its development in all means, especially for the educational & institutions ones.

My mother is a librarian, that’s why I know all this and I have been close to the librarian community here in Sudan, and to some degree I figured out some of their problems finding suitable software to use. So, we thought, why not to develop a free open source software to help narrow the gap between our libraries (and libraries in similar conditions around the world) and the modern libraries out there.

We call it "Hikma™" which is Arabic for wisdom, the story behind that is library catalogues were first introduced in the House of Wisdom, “Dar El Hikma” and other medieval Islamic libraries where books were organized into specific genres and categories.

We are in the first designing stages now and we are very excited about this project and I will try to keep you up to date. (inshalah)