Wirtschaftsinformatik - Kabul University Library

Kabul University has a real university library. While it lost a substantial part of its books during the war, the library got support to rebuild its major functions. All books are registered in a database and there is a PC in the entrance hall to automatically search the library database. I was quite impressed that there was even an office with document capture facilities: In cooperation with the University of Arizona books and documents are scanned at Kabul University, stored on a Unix server in the library and then transferred for quality assurance to a server at the University of Arizona. Librarians report that there are about 48.000 of their books and documents available and accessible via the Internet.

		On the left you see the main reading room of the library. At the time of my visit there was winter holiday and not many students were on campus.

On the right there is the office where arriving new books are registered, labeled, and prepared for lending. Before the war there were librarians with a formal education in library science. Today there is no one working at the library who has earned a degree in library science. In general, there seem to be no professional librarians at any Afghan university library at the moment.		Books are labeled properly (left) and the reading environment is quite appealing.



		There is a small number of photo-copy machines, so students and faculty members can make copies.
Below there is the entrance to the Lincoln Center which was sponsored by US institutions and offers books and reading materials from the US.



		On the left and above there are some more views of the Lincoln Center. There is an additional room (sponsored by the WorldBank) which offers about ten PCs with Internet access for information retrieval to students and faculty.

Having a Look at the Kabul University Library