Rio Declaration on the Future of the ISIS Software – en

The third edition of the World Meeting of ISIS took place in Rio de Janeiro from 14 to 16 of September 2008, organized by BIREME/PAHO/WHO , with more than 150 participants, from 31 countries and 4 continents representing tens of thousands of ISIS-users worldwide, around a program that addressed the current state of the ISIS Software Family as well as new important developments towards the updating of the
ISIS platform.
The participants to the third edition of the World Meeting of ISIS who met on 14 to 16 of September 2008 in Rio de Janeiro, at the invitation of BIREME/PAHO/WHO:

Recognizing that:

• The ISIS Software Family has a unique technological concept and developmental mission to cope with Information Storage and Retrieval Systems (ISRS), particularly for developing countries where the technology is widely known and used;
• The new developments lead by UNESCO (esp. the J-ISIS project showing renewed commitment) and BIREME (esp. the Network Based Platform and the integrated library management software ABCD) represent important advancements toward the updating of the ISIS platform according to the state of the art in software development as applied to information storage and retrieval systems;
• The ISIS Software Family has now fully embraced the Free and Open Source Software approach and the support of UNICODE structures to be fully open and multilingual, which best suits its special mandate to promote self-reliance, sustainability and knowledge-creation-by-sharing with the librarians and information workers;
• The enormous merits and commitment of both UNESCO and BIREME in developing and supporting ISIS, which has brought an extraordinary contribution to the automation of bibliographic databases, information systems and libraries mainly in developing countries, and has created, strengthened and developed capacities on ISRS, and therefore increased the organization and visibility of scientific, technical and cultural information from the developing world.;

Affirming the continued value of the facilities offered by the ISIS Software Family;

Have decided to:

1. Establish an international steering committee (provisionally consisting of the ISIS3 Organization and Scientific Committee) and accredited by UNESCO, to assist and collaborate with UNESCO, BIREME, and the ISIS Software Family Developers Community in fundraising, quality control and promotion;
2. Support and contribute to the development of the ISIS NBP coordinated by BIREME under a FOSS approach and to envisage its wide adoption and dissemination to update ISIS applications; to this end, a wide capacity building program on the new software should be prepared;
3. Address national commissions to UNESCO in order to inform them about the impact of the ISIS Software family so that they can request UNESCO to pursue its commitment and support;
4. Redefine the status of the ISIS national distributors that will assume a new role in supporting training and promotion activities in their local environments;

Recommend:

1. That UNESCO and BIREME pursue their commitment in leading the maintenance, support and updating of the ISIS Software Family;
2. Preparation of a Memorandum of Understanding between UNESCO and BIREME to ensure sustainability, especially for:
   • . the preservation of the technological identity and specific developmentalmission of ISIS;
   • the facilitation of the use of BIREME’s ISIS-technologies in all UNESCO’s member states.