Bhubaneswar: During COVID-19 pandemic all schools, academic activities in colleges, universities, educational institutions are facing barriers including conferences, seminars, workshops and training programmes. The young professionals of Odisha Library Academy have taken initiatives to share knowledge with the support of Information Technology and internet. Crish Cormark, from New Zealand (original developer of Koha) has joined as keynote speaker in a webinar on “Koha”. Mention here that Koha is the first open source Library automation software in World. Cormark described the new features in the newly released koha 20.05 version. The webinar has successfully completed followed by a panel discussion on “KISS: Koha India Strategies for Sustainability”. During the panel discussion the panellists had proposed to initiate a Koha India Group under open source community. Dr. Bibhuti Bhusan Sahoo from Odisha LIbrarty Academy coordinated the webinar and moderated the panel discussion. Dr. H Anil Kumar, Prof. PS Mukhopadhyay, Dr. Saiful Amin, Mr. Amit Gupta, Mr. Vimal Kumar V had joined as panellist and Mr. Indranil Das Gupta had joined as Guest in this webinar. Including this webinar, the Academy has already organised four webinars in different topics by expert resource persons and speakers namely i.e. Metrics and Altmetrics by Dr. Mahendra N. Jadhab on 16th May, Research Data Management by Prof. ARD Prasad on 23rd May, Intellectual Property Management by Dr. Bijay Kumar Sahu on 30th May and What is new in koha 20.05 by Chris Cormark on 06th June 2020. Now it seems that every Saturday 11 AM on the clock is reserved for the Academy Webinar and interested participants. More than 2000 participants have joined in each webinar through YouTube live from various paces of India and abroad.
Odisha Library Academy known as OLA which was formed in the year 2015 by some young and dynamic professionals and latter registered under societies registration act XXI of 1860. The Library and information science professionals never taken such a break even during the COVID-19 pandemic situation. Professionals always active, its example is Odisha Library Academy who has been sharing knowledge among Library and information science professionals of India and abroad through OLA webinar series which is a part of OLA Study circle. The academy had started OLA study circle in February 2020 after organised one event COVID-19 pandemic is going on since march 2020. Hence the Ideas of sharing knowledge with keeping social distance has been appreciated over wisdom world. Dr. Banamber Sahoo, President of OLA said “Online platform for sharing knowledge connected a huge number of participants and Sharing knowledge improves personal performance, effectiveness, and skills, which should increase personal profit.”
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