2012 Emerald South Asia LIS Research Fund Award

Supporting Library and Information Science research in South Asia

Results!

Emerald is delighted to offer a research grant for a project in the field of library and information science research. The award will offer £2,000 to fund the winning research project. In addition to the research fund it is also hoped that the findings of the research can be published in one of Emerald’s many excellent library and information studies titles.

Due to the number of high quality submissions that we have received this year, three Highly Commended Awards will also be bestowed.

Congratulations to the winner!

Dr. K. Rama Patnaik

Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, India 

"Raising the bar for fair use access to electronic resources: Are we signing away our rights? An analysis of license agreements and its impact on role of libraries in management education in India.

Congratulations to the highly commended winners!

Mr Anand Dodamani and Dr Muttayya Koganuramath 

Tata Institute Of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India

Dr Keshava

Tamkur University, Tamkur, India 

"Provision of Assistive Technology to Support Visually Challenged Students in the Libray and Information Centres : A Survey of the University Libraries in India"

Mr Krishnadas Nanath and Dr. R Radhakrishna Pillai

Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode, India

"Meeting the Sustainability Goals of Indian Libraries: Shaping the ‘Green Library'"

Dr Sudhanshu Joshi and Ms Udita Negi

Doon University, Uttrakhand, India 

South-Asian Cloud based Ebrary for Optimum Library Resources sharing

Eligibility

The main member of the research team must be of South Asian origin or be based in South Asia.

For the purpose of this award, South Asian countries are defined as: India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Pakistan and Maldives

Judging criteria

Each application was judged, by a panel of experts, on the criteria below. The research must:

• Be of significance, and in particular, illustrate how it will benefit South Asia.
• Demonstrate originality and innovation.
• Make an outstanding contribution to theory and its application.
• Illustrate the appropriateness and application of the methodology.
• Demonstrate sound implications for theory and practice.

Key dates

The closing date for applications was 1 September 2012.

The 2013 award is due to be launched in February 2013.

Contact

For further information, please contact:

Emma Stevenson 

Service Development Executive

Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Howard House
Wagon Lane
Bingley BD16 1WA
United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0)1274 785198
Fax: +44 (0)1274 785200
E-mail: estevenson@emeraldinsight.com

Nilanjana S Roy: Fasting, feasting - libraries and litfests

         The Indian dream of success in the world of letters used to be bordered and defined by the Booker. We were proud of our Booker winners, but irrationally, in the way a previous generation had been proud of Indians who held the Guinness Book of Records title for world’s longest nails or some such.

         The great Indian ambition has shifted, creating a cottage industry in literary festivals and prizes. Every city wants a festival of its own, starting with Jaipur, through Mumbai, Kolkata, Thiruvananthapuram, Panjim, Chennai and Hyderabad, with Bangalore and a score of other cities planning their own tamashas. In 2001, there were almost no prizes for writers who worked in English, and few respectable prizes beyond the Sahitya Akademi and the Jnanpith awards. At present, the Crossword Book Award and the Commonwealth Prize have been joined by the DSC Prize, the Man Asian, the Shakti Bhatt award for first-time writers, the Hindu Literary Prize and the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize, to name the best known.

     I don’t subscribe to the view that writers should be hermits, drawing the hems of their garments away from the noise and squalor of prizes and festivals. Perhaps this comes from having grown up in an era when all our prizes were strictly export-quality, and where you needed a passport to attend a festival. And after being on a few prize juries, my respect for the patience of the organisers has grown — caught between the anxious demands of writers and publishers and the often gladiatorial instincts of judges, they keep the peace better than Ban Ki-moon.

      But examine the list of cities that host literary festivals. How many of these actually support writers and readers? It is not the business of festival organisers to provide, say, creative writing workshops, or writer’s residency programmes, or public library networks. The absence of these, though, makes the present celebration of Indian writing seem like a giant banquet held with no reference to the conditions of famine outside the hall.

       Fourteen years ago, Pankaj Mishra wrote in the essay “Edmund Wilson in Benares”: “I had always lived in small towns where libraries and bookshops were few and far between, and did not stock anything except a few standard texts of English literature: Austen, Dickens, Kipling, Thackeray… I read randomly, whatever I could find, and with the furious intensity of a small-town boy to whom books are the sole means of communicating with, and understanding, the larger world.”

        In that time, the literary festival industry has boomed; but there is no interest in creating a public library system. There are outliers. Goa has launched a new and ambitious public library. Some cities have seen a revival of the privately run circulating library, and NGO-run initiatives, such as John Wood’s innovative single-room libraries, Room To Read, have done well across rural and urban India. But most of our public libraries suffer from a lack of resources, and a bristling unfriendliness towards the people who need it most.

          Writing a 2007 paper on libraries in Southern India, Elizabeth Gould nailed the problem: “My vision of public means ‘access to all’, which is an American viewpoint, but clearly in India the public libraries were accessible only to an elite few.”

        In his memoir, the writer Chaman Nahal wrote about the kind of establishment that stands as a “library” in the public imagination: “I also found a tiny shop tucked away in a loop in the bazaar near Ghas Mandi, which ran a lending library. You could get anything there at fifty paisa a day ... Munshi Prem Chand, Ratan Nath Sarshar, Kipling, Tolstoy, all came to be secretly packed in my school bag.”

     If establishing and running public libraries is unglamorous – far less desirable than setting up yet another prize – then creating a system of support for writers comes in even further down the list. The Sangam Residency is one of the few organisations that offer writers the simple freedom of a room of their own — space and time to write in peace. It is easier – relatively speaking – for a writer in India to apply for residencies in Europe and America, and yet this excludes writers who don’t understand English or other European languages. For this group, there is no support, certainly not the luxury of working in Barcelona or Italy for a few weeks.

    Some writers can do without the handholding. R K Narayan, for instance, began his career needing nothing more than a walk around the fields and his village to spark inspiration. A few years later, his concentration was so well honed that he found even a beautiful view from his window distracting, preferring his desk to face a drab grey curtain.

      But for the rest of us, a room with a view can be exactly what you need to get started. The quiet space it offers is just as valuable as – and perhaps even more necessary than – the lights and bustle of the festival stage.

More News at: http://business-standard.com/india/news/nilanjana-s-roy-fasting-feasting-librarieslitfests/480592/

Chronology of Library Legislation in India

  1948-Madras (Tamil Nadu) Public  Library Act
1960-Andhara Pradesh Public Library Act
1965-Karnataka (Mysore) Public Library Act
1967-Maharashtra Public Library Act
1979-West Bengal Public Library Act
1988-Manipur Public Library Act
1989-Kerala Public Library Act
1989-Haryana Public Library Act
1993-Mizorum Public Library Act
1993-Goa Public Library Act
2001-Gujrat Public Library Act
2001-Orrissa Public Library Act
2005-Uttar Pradesh Public Library Act
2005-Uttrakhand Public Library Act
2005-Rajasthan Public Library Act
2007-Bihar Public Library Act
2007-Chattisgarh Public Library Act
2007-Pondichery Public Library Act
2009-Arunchal Pradesh Public Library Act