The invisible Indian library - Thought for the Day

"It would take a lot of dedication—and the revenues of more than a hundred villages today—to create proper public libraries, accessible to all, across India. But the difference it would make in our daily lives is incalculable. We’re very good at constructing malls; it seems that every city and small town now has its own shopping paradises. How hard would it be for a nation of mall-builders to construct a few good public libraries alongside?" SPEAKING VOLUMES, Nilanjana S Roy / New Delhi May 01, 2007, Business Standard

See also related resources:

The lost world of libraries

MEGA Website for Indian Public Libraries - Is there any?

Libraries to go online in Andhra Pradesh: Minister

Case Studies from India: Evidence-based Librarianship. Extracts from:

Working Locally At Home and Abroad

World Literacy of Canada is a small NGO with big projects on the go. For 50 years now, WLC has been changing people's lives through literacy and community development programs, both at home here in Canada, and in homes throughout the world. Although the world has changed dramatically over the course of the past 50 years, the heart of WLC's programming philosophy has remained the same: global change begins at a local level. Continue reading

World Literacy of Canada
401 Richmond Street West, Studio 236
Toronto, ON M5V 3A8
P: 416 977 0008
F: 416 977 1112
E: info@worldlit.ca
W: www.worldlit.ca

WEB IS A FOREST ... SEMANTIC WEB A JAPANESE GARDEN ?

Musings of a student of Ranganathan

F.J. DEVADASON

See also related resources:

Seamless Structured Semantic Web -Will Tags, Clouds, Ontologies, Taxonomies, and Facet Analysis help?

Semantic Web and Facet Analysis

The lost world of libraries

posted by Blake on Sunday May 20, @12:23PM from the dusty-shelves dept.

The Business Standard - India has a look at some ooooollllddd libraries in India. But, however distinguished the provenance of these three, as also that of the Dayal Singh Public Library in Delhi and other public libraries elsewhere in the country, they are all rather sad places today. Only PhD students come here now to trawl the dusty shelves of uncared for books, rummage through the crumbling cards and brave the apathetic sloth of the staff for the early and rare editions of novels and journals. [Source: Librarian and Information Science News]

See also: Map of Libraries in New Delhi

Library Open House - Maurice M. Pine Free Public Library

Maurice M. Pine Free Public Library
10-01 Fair Lawn Ave., Fair Lawn, NJ 07410 (201)796-3400


Gail standing next to Miss Harneet Singh

Japanese man runs library on a bicycle

"And you thought you were committed to your profession" [Thanks to LibraryStuff for this quote]

Tokyo, May 02: Kazuhiro Doi is on a one-man mission to change the world by pulling a mobile library on a bicycle around Japan.

For more than two years, the 28-year-old has been distributing books on the environment, civil disputes and other social issues on a custom-made bicycle with a waterwheel-shaped bookshelf across his native Japan.

Doi left his home in the central prefecture of Aichi in January 2005, initially to ask libraries around the country to carry a book published by a non-profit organisation 'Think the Earth'.

The book documents the gravity of environmental destruction with about 100 photographs, including those of a mountain of industrial waste, children injured in a chemical factory accident in India and penguins covered with crude oil. Full news story @ Zee News, May 03, 2007;

See also: Japanese man on one-man mission to distribute books by bicycle EARTHtimes.org

Rare manuscripts gathering dust

6 May, 2007 l 0836 hrs ISTlTIMES NEWS NETWORK]

PATNA: More than 5,000 rare manuscripts in different languages are decaying in the Patna University (PU) Central Library for want of proper upkeep and preservation.

Even as the library was linked with the Information and Library Networking programme of the UGC several years back, these valuable manuscripts are yet to be transformed into digital and electronic forms.

The manuscript section of the library, once considered to be a repository of rich cultural heritage, has been lying locked for the last several years.

The section was being manned by two research assistants and a manuscript binder, but all the three employees retired and there is none to look after this valuable section today.

The AC machine installed in this section for protecting manuscripts from decay has not been in operation for the last 25 years.

The manuscripts include 1,530 in Persian, 440 in Urdu, 316 in Arabic and 2,547 in Sanskrit, Maithili and Hindi.

All these manuscripts were made available to the library during the last 80 years by different researchers and scholars.

In fact, the PU library itself is facing acute shortage of staff, with all the top posts of librarian and assistant librarians lying vacant. The library, which contains more than 2.50 lakh books and journals, has not appointed any trained staff in the last one decade.

Surprisingly, the libraries of most of the postgraduate departments of Patna University are non-functional in the absence of any trained library staff.

Last year, PU had interviewed hundreds of people for appointment as class three and four staff, including library staff, but no appointment has been made till date owing to reasons best known to the authorities alone.

Consequently, valuable books and journals purchased by the departments with the University Grants Commission (UGC) grants are gathering dust in the libraries. When contacted, Patna University history head Kameshwar Prasad told The Times Of India that the manuscript section of the Patna University library was not proving beneficial to the research scholars due to its poor upkeep.

He pleaded for modernisation of this valuable section so that the rare manuscripts in the possession of the library could be saved for their future use.

The Patna University registrar, Vibhas Kumar Yadav, said that the university would soon appoint a full-fledged librarian. After this appointment, the manuscripts would be digitised, he said.

Seamless Structured Semantic Web -Will Tags, Clouds, Ontologies, Taxonomies, and Facet Analysis help?

Here is a commercial (with malice towards none):


I found a good article on how tags are messing the Web's infostructure. See:
Tagging: It’s no longer fun and easy, By: Mark Gibbs, Computerworld (27 Apr 2007):

"Most people think that tagging on the Web is pretty easy and fun. Give ‘em a blog or a Web page and a field named “tags,” and they’ll start stuffing in text with wild abandon in the hopes that their content will be easily found by people who are desperately searching for information and opinion on feline hairball cures or cycling in the Ozarks or whatever their particular hobby is.
Alas, all these folks are doing is polluting the Web....
The first problem with tagging is semantic vagueness. For example, does the tag “china” apply to the country or crockery?
A second problem is that the format of tags isn’t standardized.
The third and perhaps biggest problem is the overuse of tagging ..."

Continue reading

Another word by (late) Prof. Karen Sparck Jones:
"Confining the SW (=Semantic Web) to field tagging is essentially high-level cataloguing of the familiar library or museum kind, exemplied by ‘author’, ‘title’, ‘publication date’ and so forth. Done properly, this is far from trivial, as the substantial Anglo-American cataloguing rules demonstrates. For example, is the author exactly what appears on the title page or some specific person? But though proper cataloguing is not for amateurs, it is not necessary for useful cataloguing to go overboard on rules." Source: What’s new about the Semantic Web? Some questions

What is your thinking? Do the tags, clouds, facet analysis, etc. help, anyways? or does the semantic taming can be done via SMORE - Semantic Markup, Ontology, and RDF (ResearchIndex)

See also my previous posts:

So much of visual literary genre, so little time to categorize it

Semantic Web and Facet Analysis

Visualizing the Web Infostructure I - Cites, Insights, Farsights