Award for Burmese e-Library project
A ground breaking University of Manchester project which allows Students, teachers and researchers in Myanmar (Burma) to access vital educational resources has been recognised.
Yin Min Tun, Research and Project Manager at the eTakketho project has bagged the Information Literacy Award, given by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals and Library Association of Ireland.
Judges Gayner Eyre, Library Consultant, and Ellen Breen, Sub-Librarian, Dublin City University, said:
"This is an excellent and worthy initiative. Yin Min Tunhas done tremendous work and demonstrates enormous commitment. A very important project which has reached 5000 students in Myanmar and been recognised by the House of Lords and Aung San Suu Kyi."
The award for eTekkatho, which means ‘university’ in Pali, the literary language of Myanmar, is open to practitioners, researchers and academics working in the information literacy field within the UK or Ireland
The eTekkatho library uses leading-edge technology and contains a treasure trove of world-class academic resources including online text books, datasets and research papers.
The free online resource was developed and hosted by The University of Manchester, working closely with a network of leading Myanmar universities.
It covers subjects such as community forestry, earthquake maps and reference data from the World Bank, though the team hope that the number will expand substantially.
“We’re delighted this project has been recognised in this way: Burma is reforming quickly, resulting in high demand for up-to-date digital educational resources. So this important project helps fulfil that demand, and despite some tricky technical and logistical challenges of working in the developing world with more limited infrastructure than the West, the project has gone from strength to strength.
The eTekkatho library is in English, with unrestricted access. The website and library uses special compression and network technologies to operate in low bandwidth (25 kbps) or fragmented Internet environments.
Most resources in the library have been compressed and on the accompanying website, the team use cutting-edge technologies to enable users to explore the library easily, even over dial-up connections.
Yin Min Tun said: “We’re delighted this project has been recognised in this way: Burma is reforming quickly, resulting in high demand for up-to-date digital educational resources.
“So this important project helps fulfil that demand, and despite some tricky technical and logistical challenges of working in the developing world with more limited infrastructure than the West, the project has gone from strength to strength.
“The aim of eTekkatho is to help young people in Myanmar achieve their educational aspirations and so move our country forward. I would like to thank everyone who has worked so hard to make this project such a success.”
Professor Amanda Bamford, Associate Dean For Social Responsibility at Faculty of Life Sciences said: “Ever since this project launched back in 2013, it has been the subject of much interest and praise and a prime example of the University’s commitment to social responsibility - whether that is at home or, as in this case, abroad. Only this month, I and other colleagues were speaking to Politicians in the House of Lords about this work which was very well received.”
Notes for editors
Yin Tun and Professor Bamford are available for comment.
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