Digital Braille library in Mysore soon

A digital Braille library will come up in the city shortly. Talks have been held in this regard with the National Association for the Blind, where the required equipment will be provided by the state and infrastructure by an NGO, said District Minister S A Ramdas.

Digital books will be printed for the visually-impaired and libraries set up on the lines of digital libraries of universities and colleges. He was speaking after distributing aids to 1,128 differently- abled persons of Mysore district at the Karanth Ranga Mandira at Karnataka Exhibition Grounds on Sunday.

 The event was organised by the Pandit Deen Dayal Institute for the Physically Handicapped of New Delhi, in collaboration with the district administration, District Disability Rehabilitation Centre and the Indian Red Cross Society, Mysore.

 Stating that houses will be distributed to 297 differently- abled persons by next year under the housing policy, he added that housing cards will be distributed on September 25. The differently-abled who are residing in rented houses can avail of the benefits.

SOURCE: INDIAN EXPRESS

Google Digital library: Judge refuses to delay case

New York: The federal judge presiding over challenges to Google Inc.’s plans to create the world’s largest digital library has refused to delay the 7-year-old case while Google appeals his decision to grant authors class certification.

US Circuit Judge Denny Chin’s order was put in the court file yesterday in Manhattan, where he ruled in May that class action was “more efficient and effective” than requiring thousands of authors to sue individually. His order was dated Tuesday.

AP

The Mountain View-California-based Google appealed the class-certification ruling and asked to delay all proceedings until the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals rules.

Chin said a delay was unwarranted, especially since it would hold the case up for a year or more.

“The merits would have to be reached at some point in any event, and there simply is no good reason to delay matters further,” the judge wrote.

He also said he found it surprising that Google argued it would be unfair to decide the merits of the case while authors were deciding whether to opt out of the class, especially “in light of Google’s fervent opposition to class certification.”

Chin has scheduled oral argument for October on requests by lawyers that he decide issues without a jury.

Google already has scanned more than 20 million books for the project. The Authors Guild had requested class certification, saying it was impractical and expensive for each author to sue Google over similar claims.

The Authors Guild has asked in court papers that the class be awarded USD 750 in damages for each copyrighted book Google copied. It has argued that Google was not making “fair use” of copyright material by offering snippets of works in its online library.

Lawyers for Google did not immediately respond to a message for comment. The company that operates the world’s largest Internet search engine has defended its online library plans, saying it is fully compliant with copyright law.

More News at: http://www.firstpost.com/tech/google-digital-library-judge-refuses-to-delay-case-435901.html

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/

Google, authors go head to head over digital books

Google Inc, in a long-running legal dispute over its plans to create a digital library of books, argued in court on Thursday that associations of authors and photographers should not be allowed to sue the company as a group.


Manhattan federal judge Denny Chin did not make an immediate decision, but noted during oral arguments that "it would take forever" to resolve cases brought by individual authors and it "seems to make sense" to consider the lawsuits as a group.


The judge reserved decision on Google's motions to dismiss the lawsuits by the Authors Guild and the American Society of Media Photographers. They accused the search-engine giant of copyright infringement when it signed contracts with libraries for scanning, distributing and displaying about 20 million books.


Authors Guild lawyer Joanne Zack said Google was an "intimidating defendant" for individuals. "This action does call out for a mass litigation to adjudicate the mass digitization."


The litigation stems from a seven-year legal dispute over Google's desire to create the world's largest digital library. In March 2011, Chin rejected a settlement between Google, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers Inc, citing antitrust and copyright concerns.


He has urged that the pact be amended to include only books whose copyright owners agree to the arrangement, rather than require authors to "opt out."


The Authors Guild decided to litigate further and Google and the publishers say they are still hopeful of reaching agreement, perhaps sometime this year.


On Thursday, while Google lawyer Daralyn Durie was arguing the company's case, Chin asked: "I guess it's hoping individual authors won't come forward?" to which Durie responded that Google was prepared to litigate three original individual claims.


"We care institutionally about whether the law is being applied correctly," Durie said. "The correct application is not to certify a class."


Chin was elevated in 2010 to the federal appeals court in New York but kept jurisdiction over the Google case, which he began overseeing as a trial judge.


Amazon.com Inc , Microsoft Corp , some academics and authors are among those who say the settlement appeared to violate copyright and antitrust law. The U.S. Justice Department's antitrust division has also opposed the settlement.


The cases are The Authors Guild et al v Google Inc in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York 05-08136 and The American Society of Media Photographers Inc et al v Google Inc No. 10-02977

Source: http://gadgets.ndtv.com/shownews.aspx?id=GADEN20120201776&Sec=NEWS&nid=206093

Library and Information Networking - 2, Online Class Room Series - IGNOU's LIS - Course Material and Video Tutorials

Course     :- IGNOU's BLIS and MLIS Open Projects on Youtube

Source     :-  www.youtube.com

Courtesy :-  Google

Oxford University, Vatican libraries to digitize works

The Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV) said on Thursday they intended to digitize 1.5 million pages of ancient texts and make them freely available online. The libraries said the digitized collections will centre on three subject areas: Greek manuscripts, 15th-century printed books and Hebrew manuscripts and early printed books.The areas have been chosen for the strength of the collections in both libraries and their importance for scholarship in their respective fields.

With approximately two-thirds of the material coming from the BAV and the remainder from the Bodleian, the digitization effort will also benefit scholars by uniting virtually materials that have been dispersed between the collections for centuries. "Transforming these ancient texts and images into digital form helps transcend the limitations of time and space which have in the past restricted access to knowledge," Bodley's librarian Sarah Thomas said.

"Scholars will be able to interrogate these documents in fresh approaches as a result of their online availability." The initiative has been made possible by a 2 million pound ($3.17 million) award from the Polonsky Foundation.

"The service to humanity which the Vatican Library has accomplished over almost six centuries, by preserving its cultural treasures and making them available to readers, finds here a new avenue which confirms and amplifies its universal vocation through the use of new tools, thanks to the generosity of the Polonsky Foundation and to the sharing of expertise with the Bodleian Libraries," Holy See Librarian Cardinal Raffaele Farina said.

Bureau Report, zeenews, India

Source: http://zeenews.india.com Thursday, April 12, 2012, 09:31