|
Written by Agnes Khoo
|
|
Wednesday, 12 July 2006 |
Dear Members of the ARENA Council and colleagues from the SungKongHoe University,
I am glad to announce that before I leave ARENA as the Executive Director, one of the last tasks that will be accomplished, is to put ARENA's past 26 years
of complete library resources onto our website at here
You will find this under the section: Library Catalogue - now under construction and will be ready by 1st August 2006. Many thanks to Dennis Jorolan for completing this gigantic task! Those of you who have been part of the War, Militarism and Peace - Human Security workshop held in BKK end of last May, would know Dennis. We are very grateful to him for being our Documentalist and Rapporteur for the workshop. Through his efficient and highly professional work; the Interim Programme Report for the WMP is now completed and will be uploaded onto our website shortly.
The ARENA on-line Library is the result of the dedication and hard work of ARENA colleagues based in HK, who have meticulously catalogued more than 1,700 titles over a period of 3 months non-stop. This catalogue represents the rich history and memories of ARENA in its 26 years of existence. Many of these books, as far as I can discern (limited by my brief encounter with the organization) - were collected, purchased or simply exchanged with friends and partners in the NGO community. Only a fraction are ARENA's own publications.
To ensure that this legacy of ARENA lives on; it is most timely to erect electronically now; this enormous library on-line. Unfortunately, due to technical limitations of our website; we can only upload it as text (in HTML format) and cannot include advance search engine as yet.
The books, journals, magazines, leaflets etc. are categorised in alphabetical order, according to the names of the authors. All these printed resources are now in the ARENA Centre in Seoul (ACIS) office. The most relevant ones will be donated to the SungKongHoe University's library over time. This is in accordance with the ARENA Board's decision, so as to ensure optimum public access to these resources in Korea and beyond.
The Secretariat has already sent to 21 Universities all over South Korea; a good collection of ARENA's own publications as gift to their libraries. This is to introduce ourselves to the Korean University networks, as well as to develop goodwill with them. We plan to do the same by donating our remaining stock in HK to the 19 District Public Libraries all over HK before we close down on the 30th August.
In case there are Fellows among you who would like us to send a similar collection of ARENA's own publications to your University; pls. feel free to let me know before end of July, so that we can mail them out to you before I leave.
So watch out for the space on the web for our very first on-line library on the 1st August 2006!
Yours sincerely, agnes khoo
|
