Colleagues

Some of you will/may notice some ongoing changes in the Nairobi infocentre space.

1. We are re-organizing the space to provide better quiet areas and study space as well as working space for the CKM people located there. Most of this should be completed later this week. There are no engineering works at this time; we may make further more structural changes but this will require budgets and wider discussion.

2. Aside from the layout changes, we are making much more accessible a lot of currently hidden physical materials; our collection of archive ILRI reports and documents and other information products (we have a similar archive in Addis Ababa), a set of theses, and a large number of specialized, mainly older, books and documents related to ILRI’s core work.

3. We have identified several hundred less relevant and duplicate books and documents that we intend to donate to local university libraries where there are more people likely to be interested in them. Before we do this, you are welcome to visit the infocentre to check that any individual documents are not discarded that are central to your work. Contact Wilson Maina for information.

4. Regular discarding of less relevant and less used physical materials is a central part of all ‘library’ management, especially in this digital age when more and more of the materials we use are online. All ILRI, ILCA and ILRAD publications can be downloaded via CGSpace (attracting millions of views each year); other CGIAR centres and many of our partners and investors also maintain digital archives. For journals, we have many digital subscriptions (ask Wilson Maina for information) as well as archive print runs of several specialized titles. We aim to retain a focused physical collection of materials that potentially serves ILRI research. While we know that most of the collection is never looked at, there is an argument that we need to keep some of these materials just in case some critical information not easily accessible anywhere else may be needed.

5. We are also clearing years of accumulated old files, folders, magazines, newspapers, and multiple versions of ILRI corporate documents (we have dozens of copies of some older financial reports for example) to make the space less cluttered and clear our personal working areas.

You are welcome to drop by to see the changes, read some of the old books and journals, or just work in a quiet-ish corner!

Peter

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Peter Ballantyne | Head, Communications and Knowledge Management
International Livestock Research Institute | ilri.org
Box 30709, Nairobi, Kenya

Office: +254 20 422 3046 | Mobile: +254 700 720 019

Skype: peterballantyne | Email: p.ballantyne@cgiar.org