Student moves HC against PhD registration cancellation

KOZHIKODE: A research scholar has moved the high court against the cancelation of her PhD registration by the Calicut University. The complainant, Shahana V A, had earlier approached Malappuram police's women's cell, accusing the vice-chancellor, M Abdul Salam, of shouting and verbally abusing her in his office.

Shahana had pursued Masters degree in library science before qualifying for Junior Research Fellowship (JRF). She joined the doctoral programme in Malayalam, but the varsity expelled her on grounds that she was simultaneously pursuing two courses. It was also pointed out that she had not obtained transfer certificate (TC) from the library science department.

In her petition, Shahana claimed that she was a victim of vindictive action by the varsity for filing a complaint against the VC with the woman's cell. She alleged that the VC shouted at her and used abusive words when she went to his chamber on July 10 with a group of students to submit a memorandum against the varsity's decision to charge a fee from students for using the Seminar Complex.

On receiving the memorandum, the varsity served her a show-cause notice, seeking explanation on why disciplinary action should not be taken against her.

In the petition filed before the high court on Saturday, Shahana has said that she was victimized and the action of the VC cancelling her PhD registration was 'biased, prejudiced and without any legal basis'.

She said the she had not obtained the TC from the department of library science since it was not mentioned in the list of documents to be submitted along with the PhD application. Shahana claimed that she had applied for TC from the department on July 12, but it was not issued to her till date.

"Even otherwise, nowhere in the CU statutes it is stated that submission of TC is mandatory for the students who get JRF to register for PhD and none of my fellow students had produced the TC before joining the programme," she said. The high court will take up the case on Monday.

The VC refused to comment when contacted on Sunday.

READ MORE NEWS AT: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-10-08/kozhikode/34321924_1_jrf-shahana-phd

Online libraries making their way into Salt Lake, the city of book lovers

SALT LAKE: Online libraries have finally made their way into the city of book lovers. Though a comparatively new concept for the city, these libraries are based out of Salt Lake and are gradually roping in more members with new and innovative offers.

Anisha Chaturvedi, who owns a bookshop in Salt Lake launched Footsteps.co.in this year with an initial investment of Rs 60,000 to Rs 80,000. "To support our bookstore economically I thought of starting an online library were most of the latest books of the store will be available," said Chaturvedi.

Initially she managed to get 15 to 20 members, and the number gradually went up to 80. Looking at the demographics of the area, she is hopeful that the demand will increase by more than 15 percent in the coming months.

Just Books a nationwide library chain, also opened its first centre in the eastern region at Salt Lake in January this year. With a physical library of 12,000 titles, the library provides online facility with home delivery all over the city. Malvika Ray put in Rs 25 lakh to start this venture in Salt Lake. "I am from a family of voracious readers. And we were utterly disappointed when we discovered that there wasn't a good library in Salt Lake," said Ray. Currently the library has 500 active members, of which, almost 300 are from Salt Lake and the neighbouring areas.

Both the entrepreneurs talked about the advantages of an online library. "Books are getting dearer by the day and even if they are affordable, storing them is a problem, library obviously is the solution," said Ray. But starting a physical library can involve huge investment and various constraints.

"Most of the established libraries in Kolkata don't have regular upgradation of books. Maximum readers today want to go for the Indian fictions. One can find these books in bookstores, but they somehow never appear in the old libraries," said Chaturvedi, who makes sure that all new books are available on her website for borrowing within four to six weeks of their release.

RARE BOOKS

Her passion for storing rare books and journals forced Jyoti Bandhopadhay to start Bangla E Library in 2003. Over the years, Bangla E Library has grown leaps and bounds. But Bangla E Library is different from others. There is no membership fee and most of these rare books or manuscripts are available in a pdf format, which can be downloaded by the readers.

"Digitalisation is the best way to preserve rare literature. And I thought of making these rare works of literature available to the readers," said Bandhopadhay who has a 950 sq ft office harbouring the rare collection at Salt Lake. With readers pouring in from various parts of the world, currently the site has 5,500 visits per day. While 40 percent of hits are from Kolkata, about 66 percent are from the rest of India. "There are many enquiries from Salt Lake, almost 18 percent of my readers are from the area," said Bandhopadhay.

CUSTOMER PROFILE

The customer profile of the area is also another factor that is getting them business. "We have received a lot of young members within the age group of eight to 10 years, who have a high exposure to online medium," said Chaturvedi who delivers books in and around Salt Lake only. "It is our kids' section that gets maximum members along with elderly and working people," said Ray.

Footsteps have many members from Sector V, who want to go for light one-time reads. These books are mostly fictions by Indian authors. "Almost 60 percent of library members are in the age group of 30 to 40 years going for fiction, while 20 to 25 percent comprises of readers below 18 years," said Chaturvedi.

The online libraries are also looking forward to corporate tie-ups to get readers in bulk. "Being located near Sector V, we are approaching different companies for tying up with us. The companies would buy an annual membership for almost 25 employees. We get the entire membership fee together. Once the members enrol, we would go to the offices on fixed dates and cater to all the 25 readers delivering them books in one go rather than going to 25 different addresses," informed Chaturvedi. For such bulk bookings she offers a 10 to 12 percent discount. "By the next six months we expect to close at least corporate deals," said an optimistic Chaturvedi.

BOOKS ON A PLATTER

With more 12,000 odd titles at Just Books and 5,000 titles at Footsteps, readers are spoilt for choice. They can simply log on to these websites, check their stock neatly divided into various categories, with each book supported by a brief description. And then place books on their 'wishlist' or 'bookshelf'. The book is then delivered to them within a few days. "For senior citizens, we take orders over the phone as they might have difficulty in placing online orders," said Chaturvedi.

With a variety of membership plans, these libraries cater to all age groups. Almost all these libraries have facilities like 'pick-up' and 'home delivery' and that too without a fixed return date.

Footsteps have quarterly, half-yearly and annual plans. And one can borrow two books at a time. "Including registration and security deposit which is refundable our plans start from Rs 800 and go up to Rs 1,800 depending on the time period," said Chaturvedi.

Footsteps are also giving a 15 percent discount on library membership till the Durga Puja. "We have our centres in nine cities across India and a Just Books membership is valid across all these cities. So even if someone is travelling, he/she can avail our facilities if he/she is in any one of those nine cities," said Ray.

Read Full News at : http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-10-02/news/34219303_1_rare-books-physical-library-salt-lake

Endpaper: When the book is a book

PRADEEP SEBASTIAN

The HinduOn the fortunes of the book: Jean-Claude Carriere (left) and Umberto Eco. Photos: S.S. Kumar and T. Singaravelou

Dips into a long, rambling conversation on the nature of the book by two artists: Umberto Eco and Jean Claude Carriere .

Umberto Eco and Jean Claude Carriere carried on a long, rambling conversation on the nature of the book over several sessions at their two homes. The conversation was ‘curated’ by editor Jean Philippe Tonnac and became a book. They called it This Is Not The End Of The Book; (and the semi colon is very much part of the title).

Disappointingly, there’s very little here, bibliographically speaking, about the printed book. And even less about the digital book, though the jacket blurb opens with how difficult it is these days to get away from discussions on whether the printed book will survive the digital revolution.

Unfamiliar with e-readers

The scriptwriter and the author surprisingly seem unfamiliar with newer e-readers; references to e-readers feel antiquated for a fairly recent conversation on the nature of the book: Eco speaks of how impractical it is to take the computer to read in bed. No one brings up the Kindle or the iPad.

We are living for the first time in an era, Eco says, where there are “so many beautiful, light-filled bookshops to wander in...” Their conversation turns interesting when they speak of book hunting in forgotten antiquarian bookshops, the times spent in old libraries, and the architectural beauty of the printed book. When they speak of the book in various cultures, the book as an idea, it is less interesting — and that’s most of the book. Though Carriere rambles more and Eco is more precise, Carriere is the more interesting for his wide ranging, multicultural references. Eco dully stays Euro-centric, referencing Greek-Latin and Spanish book history, while Carriere talks of Persian manuscripts, Sufi poets, the Mahabharata, the dance of Shiva and ancient African libraries (like the great ancient library in Timbuktu).

The argument of both these wonderful book artists is that “the book represents a sort of unsurpassable perfection in the realm of the imagination.” In a leisurely style, using personal stories, the two men meditate on the “good and bad fortunes of the book”. A perspective of the book that emerges is that it isn’t valuable in itself as an object because not all books are good or great or masterpieces. So why save what is mediocre or trashy? So, the book as an object isn’t meant to be sacred, and is not to be made a fetish. For Eco the book becomes a way of storing cultural information that one does not need to be burdened with; the book is ‘a fridge’.

Eco scores when he predicts that whatever forms the future book will take, it will have to look and feel like the traditional printed book. “The book is like the spoon. Once invented, it cannot be improved.” Electronic media formats are notoriously ephemeral, observe both writers. Eco recalls once hunting for an early version of Foucault’s Pendulum, which he had on floppy discs, but he couldn’t find them probably because they were thrown out. If it had been a typed manuscript, he points out, he would have found it somewhere in the house. After years of resisting having a film library of his own, Carriere gave in when the DVD came and began making his film collection and now the DVD is on its way out. But the tenacious incunabula, early printed books from the 15th century that both men collect, remain the same.

Passion for books

Eco admits that, though he speaks passionately of the printed book, if there was a fire in his house the first thing he would take with him is his 250 gigabyte hard drive. Both men are collectors of rare and expensive books; they reminisce about tracking down certain editions they were obsessed with and divulge their collecting criteria: Carriere’s is eclectic; one special focus is a collection of Persian books. Eco’s primary focus is collecting ancient, rare and antiquarian books on fakes.

Eco has 50,000 books, out of which 1,200 are very rare. Carriere has around 40,000 not counting his large collection of legends and fairly tales. The book he values most in his collection — the one he would grab if his library was on fire — is a 1490 volume with wonderful illustrations, plates and folded pages. Carriere would grab an “Alfred Jarry manuscript, as well as one by Andre Breton, and a book by Lewis Carroll that contains a letter he wrote.” Carriere shares an anecdote about a book scout he knew who rode in a moped carrying antiquarian treasures in a plastic bag on its handlebars!

The Gutenberg galaxy isn’t the only thing discussed; Eco and Carriere go further back and invoke parchments, scrolls, manuscripts. In ancient Rome, Eco tells us for instance, little shops sold scrolls. You dropped into one of them before heading into the library (or soon after) and asked for the latest bestseller. A week later something, say, by Virgil was copied just for you and kept ready to be picked up.

Eco also tells us that only now we know that old libraries — like those fabled monastic medieval libraries — did not hold thousands of volumes; perhaps around 400 to each library. The printed book, masterfully typeset, illustrated, bound and printed in its infancy, was expensive; 400 was a lot of copies to have in one collection.

Umberto is at his best when he speaks of books and his childhood. When he was five or six, his grandfather who had been a typographer and a bookbinder died and Eco discovered his bookshelves which held stacks of books waiting to be bound. They were all kinds of books from splendidly illustrated adventure books to science books to erotic books. They were in boxes in the cellar and Umberto would be sent down to collect coal to heat the house, and he would linger with these boxes.

Once, more recently, Eco was looking for a book in his library and his secretary suggested ordering the shelves but Eco protested; he wanted to roam and look and find it somewhere rather than go straight to it. Carriere speaks of sometimes just looking at his books. Not touching them or taking them out. Just standing and looking. And remembers coming upon Jean Luc Goddard more than once just staring at cans and cans of his film reels arranged on shelves!

Eco says keeping an old clock in your library wards off worms; the minute vibrations of the tick-tock of the clock through the night keeps the worms tucked into the woodwork. What would happen, asks Tonnac, to their books after their death? Eco hopes to leave it to libraries and not break it up; Carriere will let his wife and children and friends decide.

More News at : http://www.thehindu.com/arts/books/article3721965.ece

‘We provide e-books to about 200 universities’- Jagdish Arora

IN THIS AGE when knowledge and information is passing through technological changes, Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET), which is an autonomous Inter-University Centre (IUC) under the University Grant Commission (UGC), aims in providing all the Universities with academic resources. Jagdish Arora, Director of INFLIBNET tells Goter Gangkak about the organisation, the initiative that would help avoid plagiarism and the importance of e-books.

EDITED EXCERPTS

What is INFLIBNET? How did it all start?INFLIBNET was started out as a major programme by UGC under Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in 1991. It became an autonomous body in 1996. Since then INFLIBNET has been providing resources to universities all over India in the form of e-books and database.

How many universities or Institution comes under it? Is Delhi University also a part of it?
INFLIBNET provides educational resources to about 200 universities apart from more than 100 other institutions. Delhi University also comes under INFLIBNET but it lacks the basic infrastructure and sometimes faces the problem of excessive downloading.

What about the universities and colleges in rural areas? What are the major challenges you face in such universities
Mostly private universities sign up for access but we do provide resources to colleges and institutions in rural areas. Rural universities usually lack proper infrastructure. We provide basic infrastructure like setting up computer systems and educating the students how to use them in such universities.

Book sources say that e-books kill authenticity of print. Why do you support
e-books?
I believe an e-book is equivalent to print. If you compare the procedure that is required in creating an e-book, it is the same as print in terms of editing, proof reading and spell-check. Also, an e-book can help people with disability to read better in terms of visual elements.

What has INFLIBNET got in store for academicians?
We are working on a programme which will help academicians keep a check on plagiarism in their thesis and research works.

More News at: http://www.tehelka.com/

In digital era, libraries turn tech-savvy

By- Akshat Khandelwal

New Delhi When all information is available in an inch-thick mobile phone and news can be accessed with the click of a button, it looked like the humongous libraries could soon get converted into museums. On the contrary, the library has re-invented itself to keep pace with the times.

“Today’s library is not just a storehouse of information. In fact, it has no wall,” D Ramesh Gaur, librarian in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), said.

Like in the past, people still spend hours poring over books to extract nuggets of information in libraries. The number of transactions in Jamia Library of Jamia Millia Islamia has recorded a 58 per cent increase since 2003, while the membership of Delhi Public Library has gone up from approximately 35,000 in 2007 to 75,000 in 2012.
Explaining how libraries have managed to stay on course on the fast-moving information highway, several library officials said technology has helped these age-old institutions extend their reach through online journals, digitised archives and e-books.
These range from JSTOR, a popular online service supplying journals to students and institutions worldwide, to Manopatra Online, a database for law students.
Delhi University Library spends around Rs 3 crore annually on electronic databases of journals, a sum “impossible for students to pay”, one of its officials said.
Jamia Library has rapidly increased the subscription of online journals from roughly 2,000 to 6,200 over the past six years.
The process is more vigorous in digitisation of books, theses and primary material (manuscripts).
JNU Library, for instance, is on the verge of digitising around 8,000 theses and 3,000 rare books, while Delhi Public Library plans to digitise its precious gramophone records.
The past decade has seen an explosion of electronic cataloguing for the city’s biggest libraries. JNU Library has done away with the time-consuming method of manually searching for books. It has electronically indexed more that 6,00,000 books and periodicals — which can now be located in seconds. Delhi University Library, too, is almost through with the process.
“It is far more convenient than the manual catalog,” said Uday, a 20-year-old Political Science student in Hindu College. “More importantly, it saves time,” he said.
REDUNDANT JOB?
Has technology made the librarian and his science redundant? Prof Makhdoomi, librarian in Jamia Millia Islamia, begged to differ. The advent of online cataloguing has made libraries more efficient, “but library science is not comparable to medicine or law”, said Makhdoomi, who has a PhD in the subject from the University of London. “As a specialised field, it has some scope,” he said.
Hindu College librarian Sanjiv Duttsharma said: “The essence of library science is the skill of organising information and books for readers. Technology will change, the basic principles will not. Instead of manual cataloguing, today we feed inputs to the database.”
There were libraries that have yet to fully embrace technological changes. A Hansraj College library assistant said it “still orders physical journals and has no online subscriptions”.
Technology has its limitations, too. Tarang, a student of History in Hindu College, said: “People still need the librarian’s knowledge and skills to locate a book or reference material from a particular report. Online catalogues are not enough.”
JURY IS OUT
Opinion is divided over the old ‘storehouse’ and online information. For some like Harpreet Sudan, a student of International Law, he rarely needs to go to a library because “most of the stuff I need is available online”.
“Our teachers give us all the necessary material bundled up in a large book. We don’t really need to use the library,” said Uday, a student at Hindu College. Others like Gopinath, professor of History in Jamia Millia Islamia, said the library would prevail because it “remains the reservoir for in-depth knowledge”.
“The Internet is good for background checks, but the conscientious student still uses the library,” he said.
Chime, a 23-year old International Studies student in JNU, agreed.
“Scholarly stuff is available only in a library,” he said.
“Google and Wikipedia provide a general overview. For anything more than that, one needs a library,” Renukeer, a JNU student, said.
JNU International Studies student Sanghamitra considered the library a worthy place to visit because of the “availability of online journals and primary sources”.
Another plus-point for libraries is the environment they provide. Faraaz, a 20-year-old student of History in Zakir Husain College, uses Delhi Public Library to “avoid Facebook and Gmail, and concentrate on his books (which he calls hard copies)”.

Anjali prefers the quiet inside Delhi Public Library to the “loneliness” of her room at home to prepare for her SSC exams. “You get the urge to study when you see others studying,” she said.

More News at: http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/in-digital-era-libraries-turn-techsavvy/984696/

Information Literacy

Information Literacy can be termed as a set of individual abilities to identify, retrieve, evaluate and use information that is appropriate to a particular requirement. It is the adoption of appropriate information behaviour to identify, through whatever channel or medium, information well fitted to information needs, leading to wise and ethical use of information in society. 
To be information literate, a person must be able to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information. The information literate individuals are those who have learned how to learn. Scholars who develop information literacy skills will be more successful in their studies and their daily lives. These skills are an essential element in becoming a lifelong learner. An Information Literate student is one who is able to: 
• Recognise his information requirements
• Analyse and formulate queries based on his information requirements;
• Identify and locate potential sources of information; 
• Design, develop and successfully use various search strategies;
• Evaluate information gathered from various sources and in various formats;
• Use information in critical thinking and problem solving;
• Use information ethically; 
• Integrate new information into the existing body of knowledge;
• Effectively communicate the knowledge and ideas with rest of the world;
Introduction
Historically the term information literacy was first used in print by Paul G. Zurkowski in 1974 in a report written on behalf of the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science. The phrase was used to describe the "techniques and skills" known by the information literate "for utilizing the wide range of information tools as well as primary sources in molding information solutions to their problems". Although other educational goals, including traditional literacy, computer literacy, library skills, and critical thinking skills, are related to information literacy and important foundations for its development, information literacy itself has emerged as a distinct skill set and a necessary key to one's social and economic well-being in an increasingly complex information society". 
The complete information environment is changing rapidly, be it the form, format or resources. The abundance of information available through the Internet in public domain in the form of subject gateways, e-books, e-journals, subject and subject concept based web pages, etc., as well as the information available through different subscription based databases made available by various hosts and aggregators, is bound to play a very important role in teaching, learning and research, particularly in higher education and R&D institutions.

For Full text articles please visit - http://crl.du.ac.in/ot/tutorial.html

http://crl.du.ac.in/ot/

Library of the future - Sarah Hiddleston

Can the computer encourage critical thinking instead of passive reception? Brewster Kahle is trying to do just that with Internet Archive.

BREWSTER KAHLE:Facilitating the next generation library.
I magine everything ever written, posted, uploaded, filmed, recorded or broadcast available at the click of a mouse for free. Ideal or irreverent, it's Brewster Kahle's vision and he's making it happen while paywalls go up and rights arguments rage.
“We're building the library of Alexandria V2,” he gestures to academic publishers visiting his Internet Archive, located in a coincidentally neoclassical Christian Science church building in Funston Avenue, San Francisco. “Only this time anyone, anywhere can access it.”
Kahle, inventor of the predecessor to the worldwide web with an academic background in AI, believes that unless we put the best of what we have to offer in front of our children we'll get the generation we deserve.
“We're merging with the machine… Pretty soon we are going to be the computer. So let's make the computer an interesting companion. Let's teach it some good stuff. Otherwise it'll be an idiot and that's no fun,” he says.
Archival material
Kahle has archived over two million books, almost 3,00,000 movies, nearly 80,000 live concerts and over 5,60,000 audio recordings. He's mapped a complete record of every webpage every two months since 1996. It's called the Way Back Machine – if a page changes or an upload removed there's a good chance of finding the original on their search engine.
The idea, he hopes, is to encourage critical thinking instead of passive reception. Take TV, (they record 20 news channels 24x7) and take coverage of 9/11, which Internet Archive packaged and posted in October 2001. “What did the world see? CNN was saying that Palestinians were dancing in the streets. Were they? Let's look at Palestinian TV. Comes across very differently. I think we really know now that news comes with a point of view in this country (the U.S.),” he says. Kahle is showing off his newly relocated centre like Willy Wonka on a tour of his chocolate factory. He even has ompa lumpas, but that's another story.
“This [congregational hall] is the next generation library… Don't think of it in a row [of terminals] like an Internet café. Think of big screens where you might be collaborating with other people.” He and his team are still cooking up ideas. Awe-inspiring and interactive are the baselines.



We see the scanning centre, with their purpose built copiers complete with museum lighting and professional-grade digital cameras. Later on, in the old Sunday school, we see a machine about the height and width of a five-door filing cabinet, filled with rows of flashing slivers. It's a computer that stores 320 terabytes. Which is small. Their storage centre is made up of blocks of one petabyte (a million gigabyte) cabinets, named the PetaBox, which anyone can buy. “It's inexpensive because we designed it ourselves, even bent the metal. I think it's the first open source computer,” he says.
Kahle runs a tight ship. Internet Archive is non-profit making and runs off government subsidy and other donors. The goal was transparency. “We want people to know that we are not jet setting around on their material,” he says. There are 300 employees but only 40 are office workers, administrators and programmers. The other scanning centres are in Canada, the U.K. and Guatemala.
“What we want is more other people to be doing this stuff. They just aren't… What they are doing is often really ‘niche-y' or they just protect it. That's the Google problem,” he says.
Open access
Kahle is referring to the controversy over Google Books, which in 2002 set out to digitise millions of books and was sued for violating U.S. copyright law. In 2008 Google negotiated an agreement with the Author's Guild, so that over half Google's advertising and e-commerce revenues from the project go to copyright holders. Google can index the books but only display snippets in search results for free; any book downloaded must be paid for.
All things old enough not to have rights restrictions in the U.S., Internet Archive gives away. “The idea of downloading a million books is a good day for us. It's not something we are fighting against. Let's find out and do interesting things, non-traditional things, with our material,” he says.
Therein lies the rub. “We've got some structural problems with the web,” he says. “We gotta figure out how people keep publishing on the net and make money…We wish that capitalism would just work but it doesn't because it just goes to monopolies and kind of crushes everybody else.”
Rights issues, he says, are an artefact of power structures, and we are in the middle of a big transition. What it's really about, he says, is “institutional responsibility”; who is supposed to do what.
His ideal solution is open source at the core, with competition on services: “A distributed system for helping people set their own terms and have their own customers is the only way to make the Internet grow to the next level.”
Whatever that is, it's not the iPad. According to Kahle, instead of a shrunken general purpose Mac, the iPad is just a big iPhone - an environment that's too controlled by Apple. “That's sort of sick. It's not exploiting the better part of humans,” he says.
“I want to see these tablets prosper. But … it's the web-based applications that are the ones that are interesting. In terms of a publishing platform we have to make the web version of our for-sale products work. Because this app thing really favours a few power centres. If we want to keep power distributed let's go with open standards as mechanisms to distribute it. So that somebody in a garage can make a really cool tablet. And it doesn't have to be someone working at Google or Apple.”

Quick links

www.openlibrary.org is an online catalogue of books

www.archive.org for the Way Back Machine

http://www.capricorn-tech.com/to know more about the PetaBox

Paperless libraries

                                               

While electronic access has begun to redefine the roles of publishers, librarians and booksellers, it seems unlikely that e-libraries will make good old books redundant, says Akhila Seetharaman

A character from an imaginary future world in American science fiction writer Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" remarks, "It's not books you need, it's some of the things that were once in books..."

Today, it's possible to get all the things you may ever need, sorted and edited, without physically opening a single book. Libraries without books, or e-libraries, make this possible.

Like with all things `e', the concept of the e-library is also hazy in the minds of most people. An e-library or an electronic library can either be on the Internet or simply in electronic format and shared in a limited way.

The first step to an e-library is digitising information. Several reputed university libraries in the country, including university libraries in Chennai have significant portions of their resources in electronic format.

This, coupled with subscription databases and online journals, give users wide access.

"While we subscribe to 130-140 journals in print, we receive as many as 2000-3000 journals online," said M.K. Jagadish, Director of American Information Resource Centre.

Not only does the electronic format widen access many times over, it also enables multiple users to access the same text at the same time and protects the valuable content from being lost due to accidents like fires and attacks.

Electronic access alters the way we look at information and knowledge altogether. In the beginning, libraries were sanctums of knowledge and librarians were the watchdogs.

"There was a time when librarians thought that a good library is a library full of books," said M.S. Ananth, Director of Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. "But if all the books are in, it means that nobody is reading," he pointed out, speaking to a gathering of librarians at a convention of the Society for Information Science. Even today, many old-style librarians guard their books both from and for the reading community.

With the sum total knowledge doubling every year, digitisation is the most practical way to save information in terms of both accessibility and storage, said Dr. Ananth.

After digitisation, putting electronic versions of books and journals on networks like the Internet, is the logical next step. This enables knowledge sharing, not just with those in the immediate environment, but also with people with common interests in other areas.

Apart from digitising existing information from books and journals, e-libraries offer potential for new forms of content with increased levels of interactivity.

E-libraries provide opportunities for educational materials to be reached to remote areas and provide access to a range of information materials to all students irrespective of their location.

The Ministry of Human Resource Development has initiated a few programmes to network information resources in universities in the country.

The National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) aims at developing web and multimedia learning content for undergraduate science and engineering students across the country.

INDEST, a consortium of 38 institutions, offers online access (by subscription) to vast electronic resources on science, engineering and technology.

Several non-governmental organisations are also experimenting with electronic educational resources. Vidyanidhi (vidyanidhi.org.in), is one digital library experiment that has catalogued and archived over 50,000 Indian doctoral theses.

With fonts being rapidly developed in Indian languages, literature in various languages, including Tamil, is being organised and archived in electronic format.

Electronic access has begun to redefine the roles of publishers, librarians and booksellers. Copyright issues lurk round every corner of the e-library. But it seems unlikely that paperless libraries will make good old books redundant. Many librarians feel that a mix of print and electronic resources is best.

"Although people talk of e-books, there's nothing like the comfort of reading a book in print," said Mr. Jagadish. "Books will never go, that is for sure."

Open access to journals — a noble movement

IN HIS book Animal Farm, George Orwell wrote, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others". The need for a level playing field is heard much today in the wake of WTO and farm subsidies. But it is also increasingly heard in the world of professional scientific publications.

Look at the situation in science libraries. The cost of journals has steadily gone up while the budget of science libraries has remained static or even gone down. The library budget of the top science institute in India today is about Rs. 30 million a year ($650,000).

With this, it is expected to buy books and subscribe to at least 300 scientific journals. A book typically costs about $100, while the annual subscription of journals ranges from $500 to, yes, $18000. As a result, when the library committee asks whether some titles can be discontinued, a battle royal rages among researchers (who actually want to add more journals).

Page charges

On top of this, many journals charge `page charges' from authors whose work they would find worthy of publication. (This practice of page charges is almost exclusively prevalent among science journals, not in those of liberal arts and humanities. When I approached the University of Hyderabad way back in 1977 to pay the page charges for a paper I was publishing, my colleague Prof. Shiv K. Kumar of English exclaimed: "What! I get paid when I publish a paper in my subject. You scientists pay to get your work in print?").

Irony of the situation

The irony of the situation is well captured by the Canadian science historian Jean-Claude Guedon who says, "The beauty of science is that it has been the first operational example of how humanity can create a system of distributed intelligence. Right now it's not working in the best possible way with regard to communication we haven't scaled up so well".

Things were not so bad two generations ago. The playing field was not that level for Indian science even then, but not that off-level as it has become today. There were not too many commercial instruments, and most equipment had to be home-built using "strings and candle wax". Hence the much-quoted example of the discovery of the Raman effect for less than a few hundred rupees. A good chemistry lab in India until the late 1950s had the same equipment and chemicals as those at Cambridge or California, though acquired at a higher price.

And science still operated on a non-commercial, non-IPR, fashion and results were freely exchanged across the world. One of the major spin-offs of the participation of scientists and engineers in the war efforts during 1939-44 was the technological advance leading to highly sophisticated scientific instruments. This gave birth to the scientific instruments industry, which has been raking profits since the 1950s. This led to the great divide in science between the rich nations and the poor.

Side by side, the world of science publications also underwent a change again with a profit motive. While a generation ago, there were hardly 1000 professional scientific journals, today there are 28,000. These are scored based on their `impact factor', i.e. how many people read a given journal and refer to it in their own publications.

Journals with greater impact factors naturally have a longer clientele and make more profit. Their subscription rates are also higher — plain market economics. (The firm Elsevier publishes 1700 scientific journals, and made a pre-tax profit of close to $2 billion last year). This too has produced an asymmetry in the practice and publication of science among nations.

Changed complexion

The advent of electronic communication and the Internet changed the complexion of science publications remarkably. (Interestingly enough, E-mail and the Internet were born out of the free electronic exchange of scientific information among nuclear physicists).

Science publishers began putting out electronic versions of their hard-copy journals; some journals were started purely as e-journals and not hard copies at all. The subscriber had to pay to access these e-versions. While this made the reach of the journals worldwide (and no postage expenses), the subscription costs are still a hindrance to scientists in the poorer nations.

Man-made asymmetry

It is clear that there is a man-made asymmetry here. People of no nation are smarter or brainier than those of any other nation. As Guedon remarked in this context, it is affordability that calls the tune: "only the wealthiest institutions from the wealthiest countries can afford these things (journal subscriptions). Brains are being wasted".

Happily, he is not the only one to think so. Several professional societies and academies (such as the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society London, or journals such as the Journal of Biological Chemistry) began making special concessions such as free web access to their journals (six months old issues, or even current ones).

A number of new initiatives aimed to provide everyone in the scientific community access to, at least, publicly funded research. These include BioMedCentral which publishes 90 Open Access (OA) journals (where those authors who can, pay up to $ 500 as publication fee while others do not, but all are treated fairly and equally), the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), the Joint Information Systems Committee and the Open Society Institute, which gave rise to the Budapest Open Access Initiative 2001 that brought the OA movement to the forefront.

This in turn led to SciDevNet (which is focused to cater to the developing world), HINARI of WHO which allows free (or small fee) access to about 2000 journals in health-related areas to over 140 nations of the world, and Sciencedirect, which asks for institutional subscription and allows OA to over 1500 journals.

The free search engine Google lets you have some basic information, while the US National Library of Medicine's PubMed allows free queries on who published what where and also gives the abstract of the work, and hyperlinks to many of the journals where these are published.

The tide truly turned in our favour with the start of the non-profit Public Library of Science (PLoS) by the Nobelist Harold Varmus, Pat Brown of Stanford and Michael Eisen of Berkeley. Their OA journals PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine (authors who can, pay publication fees), started in challenge to commercial journals, have become popular. Further, actions like this have led the U.S. and U.K. governments to mandate the authors of all government-funded research output to "self-archive" their work, so as to offer free and open access on the web. In addition, the U.K. has also decided to fund the author-institution the costs of publishing in OA journals and also to support further experimentation with OA journals.

The distinguished scientometrist of India, Dr. S. Arunachalam of the MS Swaminathan Foundation Chennai, has been leading the crusade for OA to and from India. He has been requesting all Indian science agencies to follow the U.K. and U.S., lead and to mandate Indian scientists to self-archive their work and allow OA.

Maximal knowledge base

He points out that this would benefit us to (a) maximize the visibility and impact of India's research output, and by symmetry (b) help create maximal knowledge base for us regarding the rest of the world's research output.

I am sure that our science agencies, the University Grants Commission and also the National Informatics Centre will support Dr. Arunachalam in his selfless public-spirited request.

D. Balasubramanian

Reference and bibliography - B.S. Warrier

                                  

To wrap up this multi-part series on thesis writing, here is an overview of how to list the bibliography and references.

 
FAMILIAR GROUND: Those who are familiar with the classification systems generally used in libraries will find the going easy.

"Classification, broadly defined, is the act of organising the universe of knowledge into some systematic order. It has been considered the most fundamental activity of the human mind."

— Lois Mai Chan (Expert on Library Science)

A bibliography is an alphabetical list of all the sources such as books, journal articles, or other materials from which you have derived information for your research and the preparation of the thesis. The citation has to be in a standard format. The listing is usually arranged by author, date or subject. There are accepted forms of citing authors, papers, and books in the bibliography part of your thesis. You have to follow them. Some of these are indicated below.

Books

When a book is cited, you should indicate the author's full name, full title, edition, number of the volume if it runs to two or more volumes, place of publication, publisher's name, and the year of publication. The author's name is reversed; the last name comes first, then a comma, then the first name, and a period after the complete name. Titles such as Dr, Sir, and Ph.D may be omitted. The title (name of the book) is underlined. The sequence for the publication can be as follows: place of publication, a colon, name of the publisher, a comma, and the date, and then a period.

Rao, Krishna. The future of floriculture in India. Bangalore: Pioneer, 2006.

If a book has been written by two or more authors, show their list in the same order as given on the title page. The name of the first author alone need be reversed; the other names may be given normally. If there are more than three authors, it is sufficient if you name only the first, and use ``et al'' to indicate the remaining authors. However, there is no harm in listing all the authors. In such a case, separate the names with commas and put an ampersand (&) before the last author.

Article in a journal

You should show the author's name, title of the article, title of the journal, volume number, year of publication, and page numbers. The title of the article may be shown in quotation marks. Put a period before closing the quotes. The name of the journal may be underlined. The year of the publication is given in parenthesis. It is followed by a colon, the inclusive page numbers and then a period.

Menon, Jayanth. "Women in management - a sociological study of women and their professional attainments in the IT industry." Sociology Today 32 (2006): 27-39.

Internet

Apart from information on author, and URL (uniform resource locator), the access details may be given. The sequence and style of citing have to be uniform. Never try to show in full the URL including the link wherefrom you retrieved the information. This may be too long and complicated leading to errors in transcription thereby spoiling its utility. The URL of the home page of the site would be adequate.

The following sequence may be followed.

· Author's name

· Title of document, in quotes

· Title of complete work (if relevant), in italics or underlined

· Date of publication / last revision

· URL, in angle brackets

· Date of access, in parentheses

See the example shown below.

Basu, Mohan. "The Music of the Ganga." The Bengal Heritage, 25 April 2005, {lt}http://www.tagore.edu.htm{gt} (16 October 2006).

If information about the print publication is given in the website, that may also be indicated.

It may be noted that only basic information on bibliography can be provided here because of space constraint. There are numerous possibilities of multiple authors, different works of the same author, journals that do not publish papers on continuous pages, articles from a newspaper / reference book / encyclopaedia / anthology, translations, audio / video records / CD ROMs, paintings, manuscripts, etc. There are reference books and websites that furnish full information on all these. A fine reference book that is generally followed is the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers by Joseph Gibaldi (The Modern Language Association of America. Reprinted by East-West, New Delhi).

Effective use of library

While using a library, it would be of great advantage to you if you were familiar with the style of classification adopted there. One popular style is the Dewey Decimal Classification System, in which the basic classification of titles is as follows:

000 Generalities

100 Philosophy & Psychology

200 Religion

300 Social sciences

400 Language

500 Natural sciences & mathematics

600 Technology (Applied sciences)

700 The arts

800 Literature & rhetoric

900 Geography & history

Further sub-classification has been made systematically. The full details cannot be covered here for space constraint. However, the following examples indicate the approach.

000 Generalities

001 Knowledge

002 The book

003 Systems

004 Data processing Computer science

005 Computer programming, programs, data

006 Special computer methods

010 Bibliography

064 General organisation & museology In France & Monaco

098 Prohibited works, forgeries, hoaxes

103 Dictionaries of philosophy

155 Differential & developmental psychology

222 Historical books of Old Testament

325 International migration & colonization

415 Structural systems (Grammar)

521 Celestial mechanics

672 Iron, steel, other iron alloys

798 Equestrian sports & animal racing

873 Latin epic poetry & fiction

959 General history of Asia Southeast Asia

Another popular system is Universal Decimal Classification that was developed by the Belgian bibliographers Paul Otlet and Henri la Fontaine at the end of the 19th century. It is based on the Dewey Decimal Classification, but is much more powerful and is used especially in specialist libraries.

In UDC, every number is thought of as a decimal fraction with the initial decimal point omitted, which determines the filing order. A great merit of UDC is that it is infinitely extensible. When new subdivisions are introduced, they would not disturb the existing allocation of numbers.

Main categories in UDC:

· 0 Generalities. Informatics and Information Sciences

· 1 Philosophy. Psychology

· 2 Religion. Theology

3 Social Sciences. Statistics. Politics. Government. Economics. Law.

Administration. Military. Folklore

· 4 Unassigned

· 5 Natural Sciences. Mathematics

· 6 Applied Sciences. Medicine. Technology

· 7 The Arts. Recreation. Entertainment. Music. Sports

· 8 Languages. Linguistics. Literature

· 91 Geography

· 92 (Auto-) Biography

· 93 / 99 History. Archaeology

The full version of the UDC has more than two lakhs of subdivisions.

Whatever is the system followed in a library, it will certainly be of great advantage to you if you get yourselves familiar with it, as otherwise a lot of time would be wasted in searching for the titles in the area of your choice.

It is true that modern libraries offer the facility for computerised search of the titles available at any point of time, based on author, subject, title, etc. Even then, knowledge of the classification system followed in your library will be of help.


Source:- The Hindu 
http://www.hindu.com/edu/2006/12/18/stories/2006121800240400.htm

Libraries: Food for the soul

                             

More and more attention is being paid to expand the field of library sciences, which is why it promises to be a good career choice. The shift from a physical/print model to virtual/digital one has created new opportunities and challenges for delivering information solutions to library user.

``Books are my balloons!

They lift me out of one world into another''!

LIBRARIES are repositories of knowledge, information and entertainment. The traditional concept of a library as a place to access papers, records or books, is being redefined to one that also houses the most advanced media, including CD-ROMs, the Internet, virtual libraries, and remote access to a wide range of resources. Librarians organise information by classifying, cataloguing, recording and storing books and materials in a manner that are easily accessible to the clientele. Librarians also compile, collect and organise lists of books, periodicals, pamphlets, articles, and audio-visual materials on particular subjects.

Librarians are classified according to the type of library they work in - public libraries, school libraries, media centres, academic libraries or archives and the type of work they do - classifier, cataloguer, reference librarian, assistant librarian, archivist, curator and so on. Librarians are also called information professionals in libraries maintained by government agencies, corporations and special libraries.

The work

The different tasks carried out by librarians are -- administrative services, technical services and user services. There are specialised areas where a librarian may choose to focus entirely on a particular topic, e.g technical writing, writing reviews, abstract writing, computation and data evaluation, bibliography and so on. A deputy librarian looks after administration, supervision and programming. A reference librarian researches, retrieves, and disseminates information; documentation librarian manages the library's online database- organisation, training, maintenance and assisting the information service.

The work of an assistant librarian is to acquire books, reference services, computer programming and supervising of assistants. Professional assistant help in ordering books, accessing, classification and cataloguing. Semi-professional assistants (candidates who have done a certificate course in library science after SSLC/intermediate) do charging and discharging of books, shelf arranging, maintenance of books etc. Certain libraries have specific jobs like an archivist in an archives library or a media librarian in a publishing agency etc.Courses

Library and Information Science is not a mere academic discipline. It is a professional course, which involves practical, observational and experimental study. Education and training in the discipline is imparted in India at various levels, ranging from semi- professional, professional to specialised courses and research programmes.

Certificate and diploma courses range from 3 months to one year conducted by colleges, universities, and professional library associations as well as by some women's polytechnics. These courses are open to students who have completed their matriculation or intermediate/higher secondary level studies.

Bachelor of Library and Information Science-

This one-year degree course is open only to graduates. In some cases admission is based on academic merit, in others an entrance examination determines selection.

Master of Library and Information Science

This is a one-year course for BLiSc students. Graduates from any other discipline have to undergo a 2-year course.

Distance education programmes or correspondence courses are useful for working professionals and for those who stay in places where full-time programmes are not available. It is always better to opt for a full-time course in this type of discipline, where there is as much to learn by observing and doing as there is from theoretical study.

Training

* Students with a professional degree can get hands-on- experience through apprenticeship in British Council Libraries and also in some special libraries that offer certifications by Board of Apprenticeship and Training.

* Master's degree holders in any discipline or anyone who has completed BLISc and has two year library/documentation information handling experience can avail of the opportunity and apply for:

*2-year Associateship in Information Science (equivalent to MLISc.) at Indian National Scientific and Documentation Centre (INSDOC), New Delhi

*2-year Associateship in Documentation and Information Science(ADIS) at Indian Statistical Institute, Documentation Research and Training Centre (DRTC), Bangalore.

Qualifications

Recruitment to jobs in university libraries is conducted through the University Grants Commission (UGC) and terms of work and remuneration are also offered as per UGC rules. However, there are many private libraries that offer challenging work and good prospects. A master's degree or at least a bachelor's degree in library science is necessary for a librarian's position in most public, academic, and special libraries. In addition, most special librarians supplement their education with knowledge of the subject specialisation, sometimes earning a master's, doctoral, or professional degree in the subject, like in law, engineering and MBA.

A Ph.D or an M.Phil degree in library and information science is advantageous for a teaching position, research work or for higher position in a university library or a large library system. In fact, with the information boom, qualified librarians can diversify to several new growth areas like database management, reference tool development, training of database users, systems analysis especially relating to computer work, as also documentation work, desktop printing and publishing, bibliography work and organisation and management of information units.

Consultancy

Entrepreneurial librarians sometimes start their own consulting practices, acting as freelance librarians or information brokers and providing services to academic libraries, businesses, or government agencies. Many companies turn to consultancies because of their experience, and knowledge of computer databases and library automation systems and organisational skills as per the company's specific needs.

Soft skills

In addition to the professional skills mentioned, a librarian must be equipped with a wide range of personal and transferable skills for successful interaction with users. A vital part of their role is to enhance their professional performance by improving their communication and interpersonal skills.

Libraries, being the primary source of information in our society, have had to keep pace with the rapid growth of information available through technology.

The Information specialist, for that is what a librarian is today, thus has to deal with a range of sources far beyond boos and other printed material and play a key role in the process of communication information.