Blogging a book ~~ Publish or Perish

Punchline: "Any popular blogger's book would sell, that's the way it works."

'Metrolife finds out that even though more and more bloggers are getting published, not all the books are selling' More from Nina C George @ Deccan Herald » Metro Life - Fri

Untouchables strive to get their hands on India's wealth

"Bottom of the caste system, the entrepreneurial drive of the Dalits used to be stifled. But slowly that's all changing, writes Richard Orange in Mumbai @ Independent.co.uk

Stepping on to the factory floor of Suryatech Solar Systems is a test of faith. A welded patchwork of rusting scrap has been used to make a second mezzanine floor in a crumbling warehouse on the outskirts of Pune, south-east of Mumbai. Every move is followed by an unnerving boom of wobbling, creaking metal.
"This is the production line," says Mukund Kamalakar, Suryatech's founder, beaming proudly. "I started it in the last year. Before, I used to purchase panels – now we are making 700 to 1,000 each year."
It is a humble set-up – just a series of worktables and a few machines to cut and shape metal into solar-powered water heaters. But in founding Suryatech, Kamalakar – a strapping six-footer – has broken new ground for his caste, the Dalits, who lie at the foot of the old Hindu caste system.
According to Forbes magazine, India has more dollar billionaires than any country except the US and China. Steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal and billionaire brothers Mukesh and Anil Ambani are, respectively, the fourth-, fifth- and sixth-richest men in the world.
But all three of them, like 27 of the 39 Indians on the Forbes rich list, come from India's traditional merchant communities. India's untouchables, the "scheduled castes and tribes" who make up the bottom quarter of India's 1.2 billion population, are absent..." ... More @ The Independent

Businesses Accommodating Religious Festivals

Latest: Google's Diwali

Diwali Celebrations @ Ikea Store:

See also:

• Steve Jobs wishes everyone a belated Ramadhan Mubarak!


• From Diwali to Chinese New Year: IKEA Canada Celebrates Holiday Traditions From Around the World
• Dance@HCL%20on%20Diwali


• Indian festivals: Ethos and health impact


• Nod to Ramadan a trend in retailing
• Celebrating Diwali the Telugu way Round-the-world
• The calendar of commercialism does not reflect our spiritual rhythms
• Culture Matters: Navigating India's Holidays

Googlism & Googlistan:

• Google settles dispute over online books
• Building trust in Googlistan

INDIAN NATIONAL ANTHEM as the BEST National Anthem in the World

Free on the Web; E-mail forwards and turth researched @ www.hoax-slayer.com.

Internet Rumour - UNESCO Chooses ....
Commentary: According to this story, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), has announced that the Indian National Anthem is the best in the world.

©iStockphoto.com/Björn Kindler

The story is currently circulating via email, and has also been posted to many blogs and forums, especially those that target an Indian audience. .. continue reading

DNA - Opinion - World’s ‘best’ national anthem : The buzz on the Internet is that Jana Gana Mana, the Indian national anthem, has been declared as the world’s best national anthem by Unesco

Global ebook survey reveals encouraging results

"New findings from a study on e-book usage landed in my inbox earlier this week. Conducted by e-content providers, ebrary the study has been attempting to measure the changing perceptions and patterns of e-book usage among students. It is now in its third run through.
Working with 150 Higher Education librarians throughout the world to design the survey, nearly 6,500 students took part. Such a cross section of academic respondents is certainly respectable. While there is an obvious North American slant to the findings, generally half of the participants were based elsewhere in the world. Around 400 academic institutions took part say ebrary and admittedly the patterns between the US and elsewhere show similar results. So even if there is little in the way of UK eBook habits, the results are revealing all the same." Continue reading the summary by Daniel Griffin @ IWR Blog: June 2008

From the same shelf:

• What are the advantages of e-books over print books
• Reading Habits in Different Communities, PEW Forum

Indian Contributions @ IFLA 2008

World Library and Information Congress: 74th IFLA General Conference and Council

"Libraries without borders: Navigating towards global understanding"10-14 August 2008, Québec, Canada

• Access to information by the rural communities in Indian villages: the role of Raja Rammohun Roy Library Foundation (RRRLF)
  M. SANKARA REDDY (Raja Rammohun Roy Library Foundation, Kolkata, India)
• Course choice and equipage of the professionals: implications for restructuring LIS programmes in developing countries with special reference to India
  M. BAVAKUTTY (Pondicherry University, Pondicherry, India), T.P.O. NASIRUDHEEN and K. C. ABDUL MAJEED (Farook College, Calicut, India)
• Creating reading environments: our initiatives in West Bengal, India
  RATNA BANDYOPADHYAY (University of Calcutta, The LIS Department, Calcutta, India)
• Designing of cultural knowledge portal: a South East Asian experiment
  AJAY PRATAP SINGH (Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India)
• Development and use of humanities collection in hospital libraries in Hyderabad: a survey
  V. VISHWA MOHAN and VAHIDEH ZAREA GAVGANI (Dept. of Library & Information Science, Osmania University, Hyderabad, India
• From Asian Federation of Library Associations (AFLA) to Regional Federation of South Asian Library Associations (REFSALA) and beyond: a journey incomplete
  TRISHANKIT KAUR (Punjabi University, India)
• Knowledge Sharing and Practice. RATNA BANDYOPADHYAY (University of Calcutta, India)
• Medical humanities collection development: policy guidelines for Indian hospital libraries
  MEDHA V. JOSHI (Tata Memorial Centre, Mumbai, India)
• The memories of Chinese Buddhist scholars in connection with Nalanda Monastic International University in India in the 7^th century AD
  R.H.I.S. RANASINGHE (University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka)
• Supportive staff in libraries of Visakhapatnam City: an evaluative study
  R.S.R. VARALAKSHMI (Andhra University, Visakhapatnam, India)
• The tele-cottage approach to the community development in the rural Karnataka, India
  S.L. SANGAM (Karnatak University, Dharwad, India)

Making by Stealing of Un-cited (Recycled) Content in the Wiki Age: Role of Librarians?

What comes to our mind by seeing the emerging open-source and open-gate information revolution? (most Netizens may think this as an avenue to be creative, in terms of manipulating and exploiting the deep Web--with the freedom and choice to use the Read-Write Web, 24X7, via blogs, wikis, and second life in nano-seconds)

"We the users turned creators and distributors of content are TIME's Person of the Year 2006, and AdAge's advertising agency of the year. We form a new Generation C. We have MySpace, YouTube, and OurMedia; we run social software, and drive the development of Web 2.0. But beyond the hype, what's really going on?" Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and B... >>>>>>-----

The following links may make us think (indirectly, albeit) about a role libaries may have in promoting best practices for knowledge sharing:

• [KG Audit Disc] Is Knowledge inequality an open invitation to mass-destruction of knowledge? [Read my views on how a revolutionary timesaving approach, "cut and paste" has metamorphosed into a fancy synonym for organized knowledge piracy, and on a bigger canvas as a psychological disorder that needs to be checked.
  Looking forward to your views.
  Best wishesSaurabh]


• Copyright, Copyleft & the Creative Anti-Commons
• Cut/Copy/Paste - Three Shortcuts That Killed Creativity ...
• CARL - The Cyberspace Is Not A "No Law Land"
  
• ControlC: Turning Cut & Paste Into A Web Service


• KnowledgePerson.com blog: Why understanding is knowledge


• Knowledge as information in transition


• YouTubers cut and paste at their peril - Technology - smh.com.au


• Carnegie Mellon Libraries: Information Ethics Problem of the Month ...


• Libraries Unleashed: the Guardian Tackles Library Technology Issues


• Disconnects Between Library Culture and Millennial Generation Values


• Study of Internet's Impact on Museums and Libraries


• Book publishers seek ways to adapt to Web SiliconValley.com


• Encyclopaedia Britannica Goes -- Gasp! -- Wiki


• Stealing slogans from the Web


• Tragedyof the Commons Revisited: Librarians, Publishers, Faculty and ...


• Hackers, phishers can't get away with it like they used to By Jon Swartz, USA TODAY
  
• Sell More by Sharing on Peer to Peer Networks
  They say that piracy on the Internet decreases sales. Everywhere you hear figures in hundreds of millions dollars/euros of revenues lost by sellers of music, movies, software and books.
  Is it really true? Can you have a different take on sales by sharing? Here is a different story.
  Paulo Coelho, author of books such as “The Alchemist” and “The Witch of Portobello”, sold over 100 million books last year. He puts this success down to BitTorrent, as he saw a huge increase in sales when his books appeared on sites such as The Pirate Bay.
  
  
  

Tejinder Sibia, 70, dies; documented Sikhs' history in California

I think by his great contributions, he continues to live in the digital memory of the World. For instance, view this documentary byte: 'Echoes of Freedom: South Asian Pioneers in California, 1899-1965,' picture

"Remembered for: Documenting and promoting the history and culture of Punjabis and Sikhs in California and the Pacific Northwest; head of the Shield Library research unit for biology and agriculture at the University of California, Davis"
"He became an unofficial archivist of the Asian Indian pioneers in California, filling in the blanks of their little-known history with a collection of rare historic photographs and documents compiled on a Web site, http://www.sikhpioneers.org/" notes, Chris Bowman @ sacbee.com Source

News headlines:

Libraries News: Indian-American historian Ted is dead

Indian-American scholar Tejinder dead

Indian-American historian Ted is dead: After his retirement as a librarian from the University of California at Davis, he devoted his time to chronicling the history of Gadar leaders and early Indian Sikh pioneers through his web site www.sikhpioneers.com. It became a rich reference material for research on the Indian diaspora.

Death info courtesy: K Prasanna @ motorola.com

Now, Tata to help American poor

Tata Group North America has joined First Book, Washington, February 28: Expressindia.com

The Tata Group has extended its philanthropic efforts to the United States, where it is bidding to acquire Ford’s Landrover and Jaguar automobile brands, to distribute 65,000 new books to children in need. Continue reading

"First Book, a non-profit organisation with the mission to give children from low-income families the opportunity to read and own their first new books, has provided more than 50 million new books to children in need in thousands of communities in the US. As the largest India-headquartered multinational in North America, Tata has more than 80 offices in the US and Canada and more than 15,000 employees." Thaindian News

Update: Tata Companies Unite to Support First Book and Distribute 65,000 New Books to Children in Need, http://www.foxbusiness.com/

Library Lovers Day

That's a creative visualization of The Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) and their associates:

Library Lovers Day - An ALIA, PLA initiative. February 14th, 2008.

Interflora competition winners
We would love to get your feedback about
Library Lovers Day. Please fill in the form here.
For centuries February 14 has been known as Valentine's Day, a time beloved of romantics. Now a new era has begun with Library Lovers everywhere claiming the day for the objects of their special affection - Australia's libraries.
People are devoted to their library and not just on one day of the year. Millions of library lovers across Australia must be right!

Promote your collections - use lines like "go to bed with a book", or "share a book with someone you love". It's also a great opportunity to showcase your romance, relationship enhancement or true love (ie biography) titles.

Tempt users to have a blind date with a book and venture outside their comfort zone! Wrap it in brown paper (tied up with string!) and encourage them to take one home as an "extra". To make it easier write the barcode on the outside of the package.

Much more from the http://www.librarylovers.org.au/

• This is cited in Book Patrol: A Haven for Book Culture; and Infobib
  Interessantes aus Informations- und Bibliothekswesen

Pioneering library sparks volunteerism

Launched after a successful international pledge campaign in 2007, the Bakul children's library in Bhubaneshwar is slowly turning into a node for various kinds of volunteering. Professors, young artists, students, organisers and others have started chipping in. Sailen Routray has more. @ India Together: 25 January 2008


To view a slideshow @ flickr click here!

See also on the same shelf and aisle:

• Official Blog of Bakul Foundation


• Our Idea of the Library @ Bakul Foundation's Website
  
• Much more @ Google


• Yahoo Group for Bakul Foundation members
  
• [Ornet] Bakul Foundation - The library movement.
  

NB. There is a postal address
Bakul Foundation
16 Satyanagar
Bhubaneswar- 751007
Delhi Contact: Ayusman- 9810133010
contact@bakulfoundation.org

Career Path of an "International Librarian"

By Arthur Vespry*, Director, Library and Regional Documentation CentreAsian Institute of Technology

Special Libraries Association - Toronto ChapterVolume 33, Number 4, March/April, 1996
I grew up in Trinidad where as a student I worked in the Public Library. I took my first professional training from the Library Association (Britain) and came to Canada for my BA (Ottawa) and my BLS (McGill). continue reading

• *See also: the Memorial to H. Arthur Vespry (1931–2008)

Picturing the Global Library: A Call for Photos of Libraries Around the World

Calling all globetrotting librarians!

Super Conference 2008 is lookingat the library experience around the world. Do you have pictures ofphotos of libraries you've snapped in your travels? If you’ve got somehidden away on your hard drive or in a photo album please help us bysubmitting them to OLA. Photos of any kinds of libraries (or librarians)in any location are good: modern, classic, grand, humble, old, new,familiar, exotic, famous, obscure...all are good!Photos will be used in a gallery on the OLA Super Conference Web site,at plenary sessions throughout the conference and, most particularly, atthe closing plenary on Saturday, Feb. 2nd during the luncheon in whichincoming IFLA President Ellen Tise from South Africa will be speaking.Photos can be submitted in any of the following ways:

* Send digital photos to superconference@accessola.com (in any format but as high a resolution as possible).

* If you are a Flickr (http://www.flickr.com) member, you may submit photos to the “Libraries of the World – OLA Super Conference Pool” Flickr group: http://www.flickr.com/groups/ola_worldlibraries//.

Again, as high a resolution as possible.

* Send print photos to OLA, 50 Wellington St. East, Suite 201, Toronto M5E 1C8.

Photos can be picked up at Super Conference from the Information Desk in the Registration Lobby. Any photos not picked up will be mailed to their owners following the Conference.For each photo, please provide your name, e-mail, the location of thelibrary, its name if appropriate and a sentence or two about anythingyou want to point out, either about the library or about what is in thephoto.----------------------------------------

Mark Robertson, OLA Super Conference 2008 Coordinator

India's Contribution to Open Source Movement - NEWGENLIB

Dear All,

I am happy rather excited to inform you that NewGenLib - Library automation/Management software finally became Open source. Thanks to the efforts of Dr. Haravu and Mr. Siddarth, the main persons behind the software.

I always feel, India is more a downloading country, hardly anything to offer to the rest of the world.

Even Indian software industry is mostly service oriented rather than product oriented.

I feel rather proud that India's Open s/w happened in the field of Library and Information Science ( Am I communal, more biased to library profession, yes I do not mind being communal).

From technical point of view, NewGenLib has good back-end technology - Java based, Lucene Search Engine, postgreSQL, JBOSS.

Highly standards compliant - MARC21, Z39.50, UNICODE (Indian Language records can be generated), ILL -- you name any. It is more compliant than many of the so-called commercial software.

I am sure Library professionals all over the world will welcome it, encourage it and the keep it up-to-date. In one word, future-proof. (as technology keeps evolving, so is the software. Remember, how far we traveled from command-lines, to menus, to GUI and now Web-based).

We all can seriously, think of organizing the hands-on training courses, just as we all did in case of CDS/ISIS and DSpace. It can be deployed in any kind of library - public or academic or special

Yes, in my excitement, I forgot, You can download from Website

You all can help in preparing various user manuals. I look forward for you response. Perhaps, by next week, I should be able to configure and show a demo version of it on DRTC site.

Meanwhile, I look forward for you response.

with best regards
ard
Home Page
--
ARD Prasad, Ph.D.
Documentation Research & Traning Centre (DRTC)
Indian Statistical Institute (ISI)
8th Mile Mysore Road
Bangalore 560 059
India
Phone (Off): +91-80-28483002 Ext. 496

----Info courtesy: Dr. Abbas Khan, Moulana Azad National Urdu University

Library behind bars gets forced into closet

Oct 24, 2007 04:30 AM Joe Fiorito, Toronto Star
Darlene Soares helped a lot of guys escape from jail. Oh, relax. She put no files in cakes. She ran the library at the Toronto Jail. She gave out books.

Not any more.

We met in her apartment building the other day. She took me back to the beginning. "I was a legal secretary for 20 years. After I retired, I started working as a volunteer for the St. Vincent de Paul Society, at Old City Hall. One day we went over to the jail for a visit and I found myself filling out an application as a volunteer."

And then, almost just-like-that, the woman who had been running the library went on vacation and never came back, and Darlene had a library on her hands.
She said, "It was a mess in the beginning. There were empty shelves. There was no budget. I went to the Riverdale Library and asked for any books they were throwing out. I'd bring them home, clean them up, glue them, tape them, and bring them to jail in my bundle buggy." She became an expert at finding good used books for free; and in time – a nice touch, this – she began to get an annual donation of books from the Criminal Lawyers' Association. continue reading

Info courtesy [Found by Bookninja] @ Slow Reading

Checking Out Tomorrow's Library

In Paris, an International Working Group Shows Off the Prototype For a Multilingual 'Intellectual Cathedral' of Digitized Knowledge

By John Ward Anderson, Washington Post Foreign Service -- Thursday, October 18, 2007; A21

PARIS, Oct. 17 -- As ideas go, they don't come much bigger: Digitize the accumulated wisdom of humankind, catalogue it, and offer it for free on the Internet in seven languages.The first phase of that simple yet outlandishly ambitious dream is about a year away from being realized, according to a group of international librarians, computer technicians and U.N. officials who unveiled a prototype for the project, called the World Digital Library, in Paris on Wednesday.

Its creators see it as the ultimate multilingual, multicultural tool for researching and retrieving information about knowledge and creativity from any era or place. The WDL Web site ( http://www.worlddigitallibrary.org/) will provide access to original documents, films, maps, photographs, manuscripts, musical scores and recordings, architectural drawings and other primary resources through a variety of search methods. ...

Info courtesy: "Ali Houissa"

Pachauri is the seventh Indian to win the Nobel Prize

UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chief Dr Rajendra Pachauri 'stunned' on receiving Nobel

"I was not expecting any award for my efforts. I feel privileged to share it with Al Gore. I am only a symbolic recipient but it is the organisation which has been awarded,'' he said. "'With this award to the committee, the issue of climate change will come to the fore. It places a larger responsibility on me and I will ensure that more will be done."

Other Indians to win the coveted international recognition are: Rabindranath Tagore (1913) for literature, Sir C V Raman (1930) for Physics, Dr Hargobind Khurana (1968) for Medicine and Physiology, Dr Subramaniam Chandrasekar (1983) for Physics, Mother Teresa (1979) for Peace and Dr Amartya Sen (1998) for Economics. [see also: India Info Centre]

• Climate Change and Peoples Capitalism @ Faith Commons

• The Color Yellow. Run, Al Gore, Run! (Run, ICRISAT, Run!)

Al Gore ran for US President and lost; he has been running for Global Prescient for 30 years and just won the Nobel Peace Prize, October 13. When running, act locally, think globally. Now at peace, Al Gore is not running for President and losing again. He has been running a greater race. Run, Al Gore, run!

Participatory Librarianship: The Library as Conversation

An introduction to the participatory librarianship test bed, by Dave Lankes.



See also:

Participatory Librarianship: The Library as Conversation [pdf format]

Participatory Librarianship « Ellen: Learning Library 2.0

The Participatory Librarianship Talking Tour 2007

Massive Scale Librarianship

RANGANATHAN REVISITED: FACETS FOR THE FUTURE

ISKO UK meeting: Connecting communities: Content, knowledge, information: Same Difference?

Event Details:
5th November 2007
14:00 - 18:00
Venue
University College London
Sir David Davies Lecture Theatre (G08), Ground Floor, Engineering Faculty
Roberts Building, Torrington Place, WC1E 7JE

Programme

14:00	Vanda Broughton	Facet analysis as a fundamental theory of knowledge organization
14:40	Claudio Gnoli	‘Classic’ vs. 'freely' faceted classification
15:20	Jan Wyllie Simon Eaton	Faceted classification as an intelligence analysis tool
16:00	Tea/coffee
16:30	Factiva	Faceted Categorisation for the corporate desktop Visualisation and interaction using metadata to enhance user experience
17:15	Aduna	AutoFocus: An Open-source Facet-Driven Enterprise Search Solution
18:00	Networking, wine & nibbles

Click here for more Info

You a bookworm? Click and get your own library

Watch the video about the exciting free @ Gutenberg.org