The workshop took place at the Lenana Training & Conferencing Center in Nairobi. It was organised by the Kenya Library Association with financial support from the Finnish Embassy. Shiraz Durrani from the London Metropolitan University, and Mikael Böök from the Network Institute for Global Democratization (NIGD) gave sessions on globalisation and information, and on the World Social Forum. Mary Wanjohi and Esther Obachi, both librarians at the university of Nairobi gave sessions on the information activist, and on the the tasks of librarians in the WSF process. In addition, Mr Onyango Oloo from the WSF 2007 Organising Committee contributed a session on the preparations towards the Nairobi WSF (20-25 January 2007), and Ms Emma Lochery, a political economy graduate from Oxford, introduced the Tax Justice Network, which is now setting up its African branch. The participants in the workshop, ca 30 persons, were librarians from the Kenya National Library Service and various universities in Nairobi, Kisumu, Eldoret and Kikuyu. Two participants came from Kampala, Uganda. A mailing list for librarians who will pariticipate in the Nairobi WSF was created. You can join the list via its webpage at http://sympa.kaapeli.fi/sympa/info/lib-wsf. - - Photos from the workshop - Day to day reports from the workshop , by Jane Sang & Fred Kachero

The purpose of the workshop : Generally, participation in the WSF can be seen as a form of active citizenship, but the librarians also have a professional role to play in the WSF process. While the role of interpreters and translators in the WSF is to help speakers of different languages understand each others, and that of journalists is to spread the news from the WSF to their audiences, librarians should care for the documentation, preservation and presentation of the WSF over a longer period of time.

The purpose of this workshop was thus to prepare and train librarians for participation in the World Social Forum 20-25 January 2007, and in the WSF process, both as citizens and in their role as information specialists. This particular workshop should also be useful for trainers, who will themselves prepare and train more librarians for participation in the WSF.

This site is also distributed on CD. Twenty CDs with the materials as of 30 June 2006 were distributed to the participants in the workshop.
We are grateful for comments, suggestions, critique etc. that help us amend and update the content. Send your views to Mikael Book (book at kaapeli.fi) and/or Esther Obachi (ekobachi at yahoo.com)

Outlines & Recommended readings

• Module 1: Towards a Relevant Public Library Service in Africa
• Module 2: The World Social Forum and the librarians of the world
• Module 3: WSF Documentation and Information management
• Other papers & Related Materials
• Photos from the workshop

File-formats: MS Word (.doc), Portable Document Format (.pdf), Rich Text Format (.rtf), Text and hypertext (.txt, .html) and Power Point (.ppt).