Pakistan Institute for Parliamentary Services (PIPS) organized week long training for the Library and I.T officers of the National Parliament on KOHA, Integrated Library Management System from November 28th to December 02nd, 2022. Sixteen participants were nominated from the National Assembly and the Senate Secretariat as well as PIPS officers. The objective of the workshop is to equip participants with cataloguing, authority management, serials management, circulations, acquisitions and reporting.
The programme commenced with the recitation of the Holy Quran and the introduction of the participants by Mr. Shahab Khan, Assistant Director, Parliamentary Development Programme (PDP), PIPS. Worthy Executive Director (PIPS) Mr. Muhammad Anwar welcomed all the participants and Mr. Waqas Ahmed Qureshi, Director (PDP) gave a brief overview of the programme. Mr. Sher Afzal Khan, KOHA software Expert began his session by highlighting the components of KOHA. KOHA is a web based open sources Integrated Library Management System, which includes all the main functions related to library management and is used as the basis for an institutional repository. He further discussed that KOHA has two interface, integrated library management system (ILS) and online public access catalogue (OPAC). He explained the functions of the two interface, ILS performs library automation and collection development tasks that are broken down into different modules focused on simplifying tasks such as acquisitions, cataloguing, and circulations. This function is commonly done in any library. In OPAC the catalogue entries of a parliamentary library can be searched online through which information seekers can search their demand information online. Moreover, a joint catalogue can also be established with the use of OPAC, in which catalogue data of each and every member parliamentary library can be searched from any parliamentary library. Day one concluded with a practicum by the participants on using KOHA for library data management.