Central America

At the Primer Seminario-Taller Subregional sobre Bibliotecas Digitales, sponsored by the OAS at the Universidad de Costa Rica, San Jose, Costa Rica, mentioned above, the aim was to include many of the initial steps that led to the successes in Mexico in a single meeting. Thus, each participating country was asked to identify universities with sufficient technological infrastructure to support a digital library project. Then each organization was funded to send a representative from each of their systems and library groups. The agenda focussed on providing one whole day of basic training by Ed Fox (author of Chapters 4 & 5) in digital library concepts followed by leadership training and a planning session. During this portion the groups identified a project that all could participate in. They chose the digitization of their organization’s theses and dissertations and making it available through the Open Archives system using the process developed by Virginia Tech (see http://www.ndltd.org/workflow/ index.htm). The most important outcomes, however, were the creation of a network of librarians and computer scientists that understand the issues and that now have contacts for joint projects in the region.