44   inFoRmation tEcHnoLoGY anD LiBRaRiEs  |  DEcEmBER 2007

Author iD box for 3 column layout

Column TitleCommunications

Afghanistan Digital 
Library Initiative: 
Revitalizing an 
Integrated Library 
System

Yan Han and Atifa Rawan

This paper describes an Afghanistan digital 
library initiative of building an integrated 
library system (ILS) for Afghanistan uni-
versities and colleges based on open-source 
software. As one of the goals of the Afghan 
eQuality Digital Libraries Alliance, the 
authors applied systems analysis approach, 
evaluated different open-source ILSs, and 
customized the selected software to accom-
modate users’ needs. Improvements include 
Arabic and Persian language support, user 
interface changes, call number label print-
ing, and ISBN-13 support. To our knowl-
edge, this ILS is the first at a large academic 
library running on open-source software.

The last quarter­century has been 
devastating for Afghanistan, with 
an uninterrupted period of inva­
sions, civil wars, and oppressive 
regimes. “Since 1979, the education 
system was virtually destroyed on 
all levels. Schools and colleges were 
closed, looted, or physically reduced; 
student bodies and faculties were 
emptied by war, migration, and eco­
nomic hardship; and libraries were 
gutted.”1 Kabul University (KU), for 
example, was largely demolished by 
1994 and completely closed down 
in 1998. It is universally recognized 
that Afghanistan desperately needs 
trained faculty, teachers, librarians, 
and staff. The current state of the 
higher education system is one of 
dramatic destruction and deteriora­
tion. Based on Rawan’s assessments 
of KU Library, most of its collections 
were damaged or destroyed. She 
found that there were approximately 
60,000 to 70,000 books in English, 
2,000 to 3,000 books in Persian, and 
2,000 theses in Persian. None of these 
collections have manual or online 

catalog records. The library has eigh­
teen staff members, but not all are 
fully trained in library activities.2 
Rebuilding the educational infra­
structure in Afghanistan is essential. 

Afghan equality digital 
libraries alliance 

The University of Arizona (UA) 
Library has been involved in 
rebuilding academic libraries in 
Afghanistan since April 2002. In 
2005, we were invited to be part of 
the Digital Libraries Alliance (DLA) 
as part of the Afghan eQuality 
Alliances: 21st Century Universities 
for Afghanistan initiative funded by 
the USAID and Washington State 
University. DLA’s goal is to build 
the capacity of Afghan libraries and 
librarians to work with open source 
digital libraries platforms; and to 
provide and enhance access to schol­
arly information resources and open 
content that all Afghanistan univer­
sities can share.

Revitalizing the  
Afghan ILS 

An integrated library system (ILS) 
usually includes several critical com­
ponents, such as acquisitions, cat­
aloging, catalog (search and find), 
circulation, and patron management. 
Traditionally it has been the center of 
any library. Recent developments in 
digital libraries have resulted in dis­
tributed systems in libraries, and the 
ILS is treated as one of many digital 
library systems. It still is critical to 
have a centralized ILS to provide a 
primary way to access library­owned 
materials for Afghanistan universi­
ties and colleges. Other services, such 
as interlibrary loan and other digital 
library systems, can be further devel­
oped to extend libraries’ services to 
users and communities.

The UA library is working collab­
oratively with other DLA members, 
including universities around the 

world and universities in Afghanistan. 
One of the goals is to develop a 
digital library environment, includ­
ing a centralized ILS for four aca­
demic universities in Kabul (Kabul 
University, Polytechnic University, 
Kabul Medical University, and Kabul 
Education University). In the future, 
the ILS will include other regional 
institutions throughout Afghanistan. 
The ILS will support 30,000 students 
and 2,000 faculty in Afghan universi­
ties and colleges. 

Overview of the ILS market

Currently the ILS market is primar­
ily dominated by commercial sys­
tems, such as Innovative Interface, 
Endeavor, and Sirsi. Compared with 
other computing areas, open­source 
systems in ILS are immature and 
limited, as there are only a few prod­
ucts available, and most of them do 
not have the full features of an ILS. 
However, they are providing a valu­
able alternative to those costly com­
mercial systems. 

Based on the availability of exist­
ing funding, experiences with com­
mercial vendors, and consideration 
of vendor supports and future direc­
tions, the authors decided to build 
a digital library infrastructure with 
the open concept (open access, open 
source, and open standards). The 
decision is widely influenced by glo­
balization, open access, open source, 
open standards, and increasing user 
expectations. At the same time, the 
decision gives us an opportunity to 
develop and integrate new tools and 
services for libraries as suggested by 
the University of California.3

Koha is probably the most 
renowned open­source ILS. It is 

Yan Han (hany@u.library.arizona.edu) 
is Systems Librarian and atifa Rawan 
(rawana@u.library.arizona.edu) is 
Librarian at the university of Arizona 
Libraries, Tucson. 



aFGHanistan DiGitaL LiBRaRY initiativE  |  Han anD RaWan   45

a full­featured ILS, developed in 
New Zealand and first deployed in 
Horowhenua Library Trust in 2000. 
So far Koha has been running in 
a few public and special libraries. 
The underlying architecture is the 
Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl 
(LAMP) stack. Building on a simi­
lar LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, 
and PHP) architecture, OpenBiblio 
has a relatively short history, releas­
ing its first beta 0.1.0 version in 
2002 and currently in beta 0.5.1 
version. WEBILS is an open­source 
ILS based on UNESCO’s CDS/ISIS 
database, developed by the Institute 
for Computer and Information 
Engineering in Poland. The software 
has some ILS features, including 
cataloging, catalog (search and find), 
loan, and report modules. WEBLIS 
must run on Windows and Window­
based Web servers, such as Xitami/
Microsoft IIS and ISIS database. 
GNUTECA, another open­source ILS 
widely deployed in South America 
universities, was developed in 
Brazil. As with WEBILS, it has some 
ILS features, such as cataloging, cata­
log, and loan; however, the software 
interface is written in Portuguese, 
which presents a language barrier 
for U.S. and Afghanistan users. The 
paper Open Source Integrated Library 
Systems provides a good overview of 
other systems.4 

Systems Analysis 

The authors adopted systems analy­
sis by taking account of Afghan col­
lections, users’ needs, and systems 
functionality required to perform 
essential library operations. Koha 
was chosen as the base software, 
due to its functionality, maturity, and 
support. Some of the reasons are: 

■ The software architecture is open­
source LAMP, which is popular, 
stable, and predominant.

■ Our staff have skills in these 
open software systems.

■ It is a full­featured open­source 

ILS. Certain components, such 
as multiple branch support and 
user management, are critical. 

■ Two large public libraries serv­
ing population of 30,000 users in 
New Zealand and United States 
have been running their ILS on 
Koha for a few years. The soft­
ware is stable, and most bugs 
have been fixed.

■ Koha has a mailing list that is 
used by Koha developers and 
users as a communication tool to 
ask and answer questions. 

Kabul Universities have com­
puter science faculty and students 
who have the capacity to participate 
in the development. Due to working 
schedules and locations, we prefer to 
develop and maintain the system in 
the UA Library. The technical project 
team consists of three people: Yan 
Han, who is responsible for manag­
ing the overall implementation and 
development in the open source ILS 
system; one part­time (twenty hours 
per week) student developer whose 
major task is to develop and man­
age source code; and a temporary 
student (ten hours per week for two 
months) responsible for translating 
English to Farsi and Dari. Testing 
tasks, such as unit testing and sys­
tem testing, are shared by all mem­
bers of the team. 

Major challenges

Farsi and Dari languages 
support

Koha version 2.2 cannot correctly 
handle East Asian language records, 
including Farsi and Dari records. 
Supporting Persian, Farsi, and Dari 
records is a very important require­
ment, as these Afghan Universities 
have quite a few Persian and Dari 
materials. Koha generates a Web­
based graphical user interface (GUI) 
through Perl included templates 
that use a HTML meta tag with 
Western character set (ISO­8559­1) to 

encode characters. Browsers such as 
Internet Explorer and Firefox use the 
meta tag to decode characters with a 
predefined character set. Therefore, 
other characters, such as Arabic and 
Persian as well as Chinese would not 
be displayed correctly. The Perl tem­
plates were identified and modified 
to allow characters to be encoded in 
Unicode, and this solved the prob­
lem. Persian and Dari characters 
can be entered into the cataloging 
module and displayed correctly 
in the GUI. However, we should 
understand the limitations of this 
approach when dealing with other 
East Asian character sets, such as 
Chinese characters. Only frequently 
used characters can be represented. 
A project of Academia Sinica is one 
of the efforts to deal with 65,000 
unique Chinese characters.5 

Farsi/Dari GUI

As the project is designed for local 
Afghanistan users, there is a need 
for a Farsi and Dari GUI. The current 
version of Koha does not have such 
an interface, and we decided to create 
a new Farsi/Dari GUI for the OPAC. 
The Koha system’s internal structure 
is logically arranged; therefore, our 
development work in translation is 
not difficult to manage. The transla­
tion student translates English words 
in Perl template files into Farsi and 
Dari. At the same time he works with 
the developer to make sure it is dis­
played correctly in the OPAC. Figure 
1 is the screenshot of the GUI.

Other improvements

We further developed a spine label 
printing module and integrated the 
module into the ILS, as there is no 
such function provided. The module 
allows library staff to print one or 
more standardized labels (1.5 inches 
high by 1 inch wide) with OCLC 
formats on Gaylord LSL 01 paper, 
which has fifty­six labels per sheet. 



46   inFoRmation tEcHnoLoGY anD LiBRaRiEs  |  DEcEmBER 2007

Lstaff can select an appropriate label 
slot to start and print out his or her 
choices of labels through the Web 
preview feature. This feature eases 
library staff operations and provides 
cost savings for label papers.

ISBN­13 replaced ISBN­10 after 
January 1, 2007, and any ILS has to 
be able to handle the new ISBN­13. 
Our ILS has been improved to han­
dle both ISBN standards. Thanks to 
Koha’s delegation of the GUI and 
major functionality, interfaces such 
as fonts and Web pages can be modi­
fied through the templates and CSS. 
A Z39.50 service has been configured 
to allow users to search other librar­
ies’ catalogs.

Hardware and software 
support

Afghanistan is still developing its fun­
damental infrastructure: electricity, 
transportation, and communication. 
When considering buying hardware 
for the ILS, difficult issues, such as 
server services and computer parts, 
have to be solved. Even international 
IT companies, such as Dell, HP, and 

IBM, have very limited services and 
support in Afghanistan. 

Regarding software and system 
support, our strategies are to: 

■ maintain and develop the open 
source software at the UA library 
by the project team;

■ run one server in Kabul, 
Afghanistan, administrated by a 
local system administrator.

■ run one server in the UA library 
administrated by the library’s 
system administrator.

Cost

We estimated our overall cost for 
building the open­source system is 
low and reasonable. 

The system is currently run­
ning on a Dell 2800 server ($5,000 
for 3GHZ CPU, 4GB RAM, and 
five 73GB hard drives), kernel built 
Debian Linux (free), Apache 2 (free), 
MySQL (free), and Perl (free). Han  
spends four hours per week for coor­
dination, communication, and man­
agement of the project. The student 
developer works twenty hours per 
week for development and mainte­
nance, while the translation student 
will spend one hundred hours for 
translation. 

Conclusion

Revitalizing an Afghan ILS is the 
first important goal to build digital 
library initiatives for the Afghanistan 
higher education system. By under­
standing Afghan university librar­
ies, collections, and users, the UA 
library is working with other DLA 

members to build the open source 
ILS. The new Farsi and Dari user 
interface, language support, and 
other improvements have been 
made to meet needs of Afghan uni­
versities and colleges. The cost of 
using and developing existing open 
source software is reasonable. 

Acknowledgments

We thank USAID, Washington State 
University, and other DLA mem­
bers for providing support. This 
work was supported by USAID and 
Washington State University.

References and notes

 1. Nazif Sharani et. al., Conference 
transcription, Conference on Strate­
gic Planning of Higher Education for 
Afghanistan, 2002, Indiana University, 
Bloomington, Oct. 6–7.
 2. Atifa Rawan, Transformation in 
Afghanistan: Rebuilding Libraries, paper 
presented at AZLA conference, Mesa, 
Ariz., Oct. 11–13, 2005.
 3. The University of California 
Libraries, Rethinking How We Provide 
Bibliographic Services for the University of 
California, 2005, http://libraries.univer­
sityofcalifornia.edu/sopag/BSTF/Final.
pdf. 
 4. Eric Anctil and Jamshid Beheshti, 
Open Source Integrated Library Systems: An 
Overview, 2004, www.anctil.org/users/
eric/oss4ils.html (accessed Nov. 5, 2006).
 5. Derming Juang et al., “Resolving 
the Unencoded Character Problem for 
Chinese Digital Libraries,” Proceedings of 
the 5th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on 
Digital Libraries, JCDL 2005, Denver (June 
7–11, 2005): 311–19 (New York: ACM Pr., 
2005).

Figure 1: Afghanistan academic libraries 
union catalog in Farsi/Dari

LITA cover 2, cover 3, cover 4

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