Oman to Fund a New Library in Uzbekistan: The ‘Abu Alraihan Albairuni’ library

7 October 2009 MUSCAT — A new library at the Oriental Studies Institute in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent will be built with funds provided by the government of Oman, according to an agreement signed between the two countries on Monday, the second and final day of an official visit here by Islam Karimov, the President of Uzbekistan.

The ‘Abu Alraihan Albairuni’ library will house more than 26,000 manuscripts, 85,000 historical messages, most of them in the Turkish, Uzbek and Farsi languages, as wells as 10,000 manuscripts in Arabic, currently in the possession of the institute.

Most of these rare documents date back to the 17^th and 18^th centuries. UNESCO has listed them in its World Heritage List as there are no similar copies anywhere else in the world.

The accord was signed by National Economy Minister of Oman Ahmed bin Abdulnabi Macki and Vladir Norov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of 
Uzbekistan.

Several other deals were also concluded between the two countries including regularising air transportation and to promote cooperation 
in tourism.

The two leaders, during the meetings, also exchanged views on the 
latest developments at the regional and international levels, an official 
statement said. [source: Khaleej Times Online

ravindranath@khaleejtimes.com]

• Sultanate and Uzbekistan ink six pacts and nine MoUs

EU's new digital library operational again

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union's first large-scale digital library, Europeana (www.europeana.eu), was online again Tuesday, a month after it crashed after being overwhelmed by readers' interest.

"Europeana works again ... after we have quadrupled server capacity," European Commission spokesman Martin Selmayr told a daily news briefing. continue reading

See my previous post: Europeana ~ On hold

Europeana ~ On hold

Info courtesy: Dawn Bassett @ A Librarian's ramblings

Please wait, you are in queue, Your Click is Important to Us: "We launched the Europeana.eu site on 20 November and huge use - 10 million hits an hour - meant it slowed to a crawl. We are doing our best to reopen Europeana.eu in a more robust version."

Who Has The Largest Individual Vocabulary?

Guess: Native speakers or non-native speakers?

Whatever may happen in the future, regardless of species, who has the largest English vocabulary right now? This is not a straightforward question. Michael Quinion explains why:

“What we mean by word sounds obvious, but it’s not. Take a verb like climb. The rules of English allow you to generate the forms climbs, climbed, climbable, and climbing, the nouns climb and climber (and their plurals climbs and climbers), compounds such as climb-down and climbing frame, and phrasal verbs like climb on, climb over, and climb down. Now, here’s the question you’ve got to answer: are all these distinct words, or do you lump them all together under climb? ...

"Of all the people I know, my meditation teacher Sri Chinmoy definitely has the largest vocabulary, however it’s measured. Growing up in East Bengal, English was not his first language, but I regularly come across English words in his writings which I have never seen before. Take my favourite example: sesquipedalian (meaning a very long word)." continue reading English as a Fecund Language @ Sumangali.org: In the Spirit of Serendipity

Much more about Sri Chinmoy from his fans: My Life with Sri Chinmoy / Photos of Sri Chinmoy / Sri Chinmoy on DVD

eBooks from European Libraries

eod eBooks - eBooks on Demand - is a European project to make millions of books in European libraries available electronically on demand.

From About eod: "Users will be able to order eBooks via the common library catalogues; the libraries will then digitise the requested item and send it to the user via the EOD service network. The books digitised in this way will simultaneously be incorporated into the digital libraries of the participating libraries and thus be accessible on the Internet."
Currently the project includes 13 libraries from 8 European countries. The UK and

France are not on the list of participating countries: Austria and Germany are.

Source: Gwen @ Internet News