INFOTHECA, march 2003/1
Visit to Belgrade, October 28-30 2002
Alan Hopkinson
Midlseks Univerzitet
The TEMPUS project is about establishment of the cooperative cataloguing system for Serbian Academic Libraries and about exchange of experience with librarians from EU. The National Library helped out to enable them to rejoin COBISS (a BLCMP type of cooperative covering former Yugoslavia) and, hereby providing accommodation of our seminar, though it is not participating directly in this TEMPUS project.
We were met at the airport at 22.30 by Aleksandra Ciric, Librarian of the University of Arts Belgrade and Stela Filipi- Matutinovic, TEMPUS Project Coordinator. Since we had obtained our visas in London, we went through passport control very quickly. We were taken by car to Slavija Hotel, very central and close to the National Library in whose auditorium the workshop took place.
Sunday we were taken round the city by Aleksandra, visiting the National Gallery and the Ethnography Museum. We then looked down on the confluence of the Sava and the Danube with New Belgrade in the distance, from the vantage point of an old fort and had a meal at the reportedly oldest restaurant in Belgrade before visiting Library of the Faculty of Applied Art, in which Aleksandra works. Then we went to a church in the old city and in the evening Alan and Meg went to the theatre.
On Monday the Workshop in the National Library began at 10.20, some 20 minutes late as we were awaiting the group from Niš who had planned to arrive around that time, since they had come by bus some 300 km, having departed at 7am. After a brief welcome by Dr Ugricic, Director of the National Library, and Dr Dejan Adjacic, Acting Director of the University of Belgrade Library, Stela Filipi-Matutinovic gave a resume of progress so far in Tempus. Then Judith gave a paper describing converged library and computing services in the UK. Meg gave a paper on library facilities for distance learning. After a coffee break Alan gave a paper entitled The Electronic Jungle explaining how links to electronic resources are set up and how they sometimes disappear. Lunch took place from 3pm to 5pm and was hosted by Vesna Injac-Malbaša, the Director for International Relations at the National Library and Dejan Ajdacic, acting director of the University library in Belgrade. After lunch we went to the University of Belgrade Library and after a tour of the facilities including the vast storage we discussed the programme for the visits to the UK in December.
On Tuesday, the papers were well received. Meg gave a talk on Key Skills and Judith gave a talk on training for librarians in the UK in general. Alan gave a talk on MARC, what it is and how the UK is going to implement MARC 21. After tea he gave a talk on the Alexandria Library in Egypt whose opening he had attended earlier that month. After the papers, Judith and Meg went a tour of the National Library while Alan visited Biljana Kosanovic, Head of Department of Scientific Information and the data processing department (where she was formerly systems analyst) to see their current cataloguing system for small libraries, to be replaced by COBISS. Judith and Meg were impressed by the inventiveness of the staff who had written to local artists asking them to donate one of their works of art. This had proved successful and the National Library now has quite a collection of modern Serbian art decorating the walls and public areas.
Judith and Meg returned on Wednesday but Alan went to Niš to see the situation there. He was accompanied by Biljana and Stela and they went in the National Library's car.
The University of Niš is 40 years old, though the library and computing centre are in an older building which belongs to the city and part is still occupied by judges. It lies between the market and a bridge over the River Nišava and NATO bombers hit both these at 11am one morning, killing many people and the result is that the top floor of the library is unusable now.
The library has collected 75,000 books in 35 years. A few hundred periodicals are taken mostly by exchange. They have a history of cooperation with he University of Belgrade and have modelled themselves on it. At the end of the 1980s, Zoran Živkovic, now Director, was in charge of reference services and became interested in automation. They realised they would get no help, so decided to do it themselves and when Unesco produced a network version of CDS/ISIS they started students reading room at the University Library “Svetozar Markovic” using that, with Zoran making full use of the programming facilities contained in the package to extend it. All has worked well though since the computers are out of date they have not been able to connect them to the network. Most are 386s, some Pentium I with a few good Pentiums. The network link between library and computer centre is not good. For the last four years they have had some funding from OSF and now they have Tempus so they expect to advance and want a new network with 50 PC`s. They have 23 staff and Zoran wants it to become the number one library in south-east Serbia, covering an area of 1.5 million population. Two thirds of the staff are young but inexperienced. Zoran was 10 years the Head of the Reference Department, before becoming library director. An electronics professor around 1985 suggested they should know about automation and put them in the right direction (Zoran is a graduate in English language and literature). They bought a Sinclair PC, went to conferences and visited Graz. In 1992 their first network was installed but nothing much happened in the 1990`s because of sanctions and the network equipment became obsolete. About 8,000 books less than before were bought through sanctions. The Library needs its own systems engineer, but the rector and newly appointed director of the Computing Centre talked together and would like guidance on how to organize the relationships between the two services. The Rect?r is in a Tempus project on university governance with Sofia, Skopje and Thessaloniki and was in Thessaloniki at the time, so he could not meet Alan. Biljana and Alan looked at the many CDS/ISIS databases they have, noting particularly an innovative use of print formats in Niš for validation purposes, when using the DOS version. Afterwards, a short excursion was made to Niš Spa (Niška banja) and the Emperor Constantine's palace (he was born in Niš where his father served in the Roman Army).
Judith, Meg and Alan would like to thank the hosts for their tremendous hospitality and the National Library for their support which made the visit so much more effective. They were also impressed by the enthusiasm and interest of the librarians who attended the lectures and question and answer sessions. The physical environment in which many of the librarians work is difficult and it made us realise how fortunate we are to work in a well-developed and well-resourced UK library. University of Nis
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