Dili Institute of Technology

Avenell Hicks reports:

Until recently I worked as a librarian at Edith Cowan University in Perth andI commenced my two-year stint as librarian at the Dili Institute of Technology on 10 May this year. (My husband and I are both in East Timor through Australian Volunteers International to work at the Institute). This day just happened to be the second anniversary of DIT, so was treated to a day of celebrations and partying. Rather an auspicious day to start.

DIT is progressively rehabilitating buildings at a site previously used by the Indonesian police, and when I first arrived the building which was to house the library was still just a shell. For the first four weeks I familiarised myself (largely by trial and error) with Winisis which I'm to use for the catalogue, visited other libraries in Dili and made myself rough notes on policies, budget, planning etc. It was great to visit the Xanana Gusmao Reading Room and UNTL library and to meet people I'd read about in the APSIG and FUNTLL newsletters! During this time I also had a visit from Patti Manolas who is currently conducting a survey of libraries in East Timor. As well as all this I 'helped' the English teacher with some of her classes. She will be very glad when a qualified ESL teacher arrives later this month.

As the date of the official opening (by Jon Stanhope, chief minister of the ACT) drew nearer and work on the building became ever more frenetic, I realised I would only have a day or so to set up the library. In an effort to make it look like 'a Library' for the opening I prepared (in Bahasa, English and Tetun) a few signs, a summary of the Dewey system and some shelf labels for the main topics covered by DIT courses. On the Friday morning the shelving, donated from Australia, was retrieved from storage and re-assembled and mid-afternoon a horde of student volunteers descended and we blu-tac'd the signs up and roughly sorted the books onto the shelves. Just in time for the official opening on Monday 7 June. The remainder of the week I spent stamping books and more carefully organising them on the shelves, so the students could start to use them, while I set about getting them catalogued.

The collection has about 1000 volumes, some in English donated from Australia, some new in Bahasa Indonesia purchased with a donation from the Asia Foundation, and a few published locally in Tetun. The library has one main room full of shelving, with an alcove at one end housing four PCs for student use, an adjacent reading room with desks for study, and another small room which will be the photocopy room - when the photocopier arrives.

It will remain a non-lending library until the collection has grown a bit. For now we are working on obtaining funding for Internet access and some sort of security system, and I will get down to cataloguing.

My e-mail is avenelh@iinet.net.au.nospam (please remove '.nospam' from address)

Avenel Hicks
Librarian
Dili Institute of Technology
PO Box 293
Dili, Timor-Leste
mb +670 726 0462

Jill Haynes returns to Dili

Jill Haynes, the library manager at the Australian Institute of Sport, has now set off again for Dili. Her talk at the Asia Bookroom earlier this year was reported in March 2004 issue of the APSIG newsletter. Jill will be working as liaison officer for APHEDA, the Australian NGO which has been supporting library volunteers. She can be contacted at jill_haynes17@hotmail.com.nospam (please remove '.nospam' from address).

Results of the trivia nights in Canberra and Melbourne to raise funds for libraries were excellent. Over $33 000 was raised.

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