[Fsf-friends] ILUG-Goa: Tech writing, software for libraries...

Frederick Noronha (FN) fred@[EMAIL-PROTECTED]
Wed Mar 29 16:13:50 IST 2006


March 25 saw an interesting user-group meet, with a full-house in the
small Goa Science Centre board-room.

Suhag Shirodkar, recently re-settled back from the US, explained all
about technical writing and what it offered to youth wanting a career in
it. She mentioned they had opened a 'brand new' India office at
Caranzalem (Goa) and were looking for writers with the required skills.

Though this is not a GNU/Linux subject, it obviously would be of
interest to many of our younger members. GNU/Linux also needs to build
its own technical writing skills.

Suhag said they had three lines of work -- writing for the hardware and
software industry, science writing (grant proposals, white papers,
abstracts), and business writing (web content, white-papers, etc).

Edgar D'Souza, ILUG-Goa's long time member, shared his own experiences
in technical writing.Suhag stressed that what was needed was good
grammer, a knowledge of sentence structures, the use of thought and
logic inone's work.

"Technical writing is not about giving an opinion, or having a slant and
angle. It's about figuring out who is the user (of your writing) and
what they need to know. It's not about us and what we want, but it's
about what other people want," she added.

          She stressed that the fundamental "building blocks" of
          good technical included good knowledge of the subject,
          some domain knowledge (either in coding, or having worked
          as a physicist, biotechnologist, chemist).

"There are many things thrown on our plate that we know nothing about.
Our job is to grasp the fundamentals quickly, talk to the experts and
get the knowledge," she added. "It's not rocket science."

* * * * * * * * * * 

After a brief Q&A, Bijon Shaha took up the challenge of presenting ideas
he had encountered minutes earlier. He shared with all a presentation
titled Introduction to Open Source Library Management Systems. This talk
is by Edward M. Corrado of Rider University Libraries and 
ecorrado at library.rider.edu You could probably find a copy on the
internet, or ask me for one which ia 1.8MB file.

A very interesting subject. It covers software such as Koha, the
made-in-Finland Emilda (www.emilda.org), PhPMyLibrary from the
Philippines, phpmybibli (from FRance), OpenBiblio (which works on
GNU/Linux as well as Windows), AvantiMicroLCS (an easy-to-install tool
with a small footprint) and more.

The screenshots are very interesting and instructive.

After sharing time with the 15 people present, we broke and look forward
to the meet on April 22, 2006. Do send in your suggestions on what you
can talk about then... FN
-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------
| India Linux Users' Group, Goa                             |
| Join the friendly user group                              |
| Mail list http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ilug-goa/join     |
 ---------------------------------------------------------- |
| http://groups.yahoo.com/group/teach-yourself-linux        |
| http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ilug-goa-announce           |
| http://www.iosn.net/country/india/organizations/ilug-goa/ |
------------------------------------------------------------- 
         ,            ,
        /             \        .-.      * SOFTWARE
       ((__-^^-,-^^-__))      (. .)     * FREEDOM
        `-_---' `---_-'       / V \     * SHARING  
         `--|o` 'o|--'       //   \\
            \  `  /         /(     )\     KNOWLEDGE IS POWER
             ): :(          '.^^_^^.'     SHARE IT EQUITABLY
             :o_o:           \_/ \_/
              "-"




More information about the Fsf-friends mailing list