2001 Educational Reform Project whereby core team teachers from partner schools travel periodically to deliver inservice training workshops to other schools. The project
provided vans, equipment and learning materials for six regional education centers (regional branches of the Ministry
of Education.)
The project was designed
so that vans would
visit each village in the region at least twice during the year,
at intervals of at least several weeks; during the first visit,
books would be checked out by local teachers and citizens,
and during the second visit they would be returned or exchanged for new books.
However, some of the same conditions that make mobile
libraries a necessity also make implementation extremely
problematic. Certain villages are so far apart that it takes at
least a day to travel from one to the next; road conditions are
extremely poor, and require durable vehicles and frequent
repairs; demand for books (especially in Mongolian language) far exceeds the scarcity of resources and in many
cases there aren’t enough books to loan out from town to
town before the vans are empty. Mongolia is also a good
example of a country that may ‘leap-frog’ communications
technology, since existing land-lines for telephone services
are rare, making it an appropriate candidate for wired mobile
library services using new technologies.
Other countries have found ways to adapt mobile library
services to their particular resources and constraints, for example:
•
• The Camel Caravan service of the National Library in
Kenya;
• The Mobile Floating Library in Thailand: Since 1999,
the Mobile Floating Library has operated along rivers and
canals to promote reading and water conservation and environmental education through books, toys and exhibitions.
Volunteers also carry books inland to those who cannot reach
the floating library themselves;5
• The Library Wagon in Mali: Since 1980 the librarywagon makes 11 stops on the railroad between Bamako and
the Senegalese border. The newest 40-ton wagon contains
3,000 books and 300 videotapes. The wagon stays for two
days in each town and uses solar energy for multimedia projections. As part of the Public Reading Operation, the library
wagon also provides training and services to public school
libraries, helping to create a nationwide network of public
libraries;6
and
\
• Greece’s “Blue Sack” can hold up to 150 books and
audiovisual materials divided according japan phone number library to the Dewey Decimal System. It visits Greek schools (presumably, with
someone carrying it) to present a different subject to students
and allowing them to borrow books until the next visit.
What’s New?
Of interest to TechKnowLogia readers will be the latest innovations combining mobile library services with IT services, making them mobile community telecenters. The donkey cart mentioned above, for example, will soon become a
“donkey-drawn mobile electro communication library cart,”
offering such services as access radio, television, telephone,
fax, e-mail and Internet.7
The Mobile Internet Unit (MIU) in Malaysia
(http://www.miu.nitc.org.my) was designed entirely by local
designers, engineers and IT experts and contains 20 Pentium
III workstations with CD-ROMs and headsets, a color
printer, a fax machine, foldable seats, bookshelves, a television, projection screen and slide projector, a refrigerator and
A toilet
Generators provide power, air conditioning and an
alarm system. The objectives of the MIU are to promote ICT
training and computer literacy to students and teachers, and
to assess the impact of ICTs on the learning environment.
The MIU was initiated as a joint new and abandoned routines that have helped me raise the bar in 2024 project between the National IT Council (NITC), Education Ministry, United Nations
Development Programme
(UNDP), Mimos Berhad and
Automotive Corp (M) Sdn Bhd. The total crawler data cost of the partnership between UNDP, the government and other private
sponsors is US$420,000. A similar project initiated at the
Universiti Malaysia Sarawak is building a Mobile Internet
Boat to expose rural children to ICTs. In August 1999 the
project began visiting 20 low-resource rural schools to give a
series of 10 one-hour lessons designed to help students and
teachers acquire ICT skills. The Malaysian government has
been so pleased with the project that it plans to invest in up
to 20 additional Internet Units. Mimos Berhad also expanded the impact of the project by donating one computer
with free Internet access to each of the participating schools
so that they could continue to learn while the MIU was away