International and Comparative Librarianship

DEDICATED TO PIONEERS   INCLUDING:
S. R. Ranganathan, P. N. Kaula, R. N. Sharma, J. F. Harvey, D. J. Foskett, J. P. Danton, M. M. Jackson, etc.
This Blogosphere has a slant towards India [a.k.a Indica, Indo, South-Asian, Oriental, Bharat, Hindustan, Asian-Indian (not American Indian)].

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Now entire library on chip developed by Indian-American

By IANS, 29 April 2010

Washington: An Indian-American scientist has developed a computer chip that can store an unprecedented amount of data - enough to hold an entire library.
The new chip stems from a breakthrough in the use of nanodots, or nanoscale magnets, and represents a significant advance in computer-memory technology.
"We have created magnetic nanodots that store one bit of information on each nanodot, allowing us to store over one billion pages of information in a chip that is one square inch," says Jay Narayan, professor of Materials Science and Engineering at North Carolina State University (NCSU).
Narayan, a product of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, conducted the study. continue reading Economic Times

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Sunday, December 14, 2008

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."

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Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine: World Wide Webliographers' Revisited

SCIENCE | June 17, 2008
The Web Time Forgot
By ALEX WRIGHT
The Mundaneum Museum honors the first concept of a world wide wonder, sketched out by Paul Otlet in 1934 as a global network of “electric telescopes.”...

Extract: Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where “anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation.”...
On the same shelf:

[Info courtesy: sdyck@hevanet.com ]

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Sunday, June 15, 2008

Guyana's Randall Butisingh is a blogger at the age of 96



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Monday, October 29, 2007

Stay in India for free via blogger Web site

Tony Tharakan , Reuters & CanWest News Service, 27 Sep 2007

Hotel rooms in India tend to be expensive and hard to find, but a new Web site is helping visitors find a bed, with a warm conversation thrown in, all for free.



While most hosts on http://www.extrabed.in/ offer a spare bed and an Internet connection, some offer sightseeing tours, endless cups of coffee or even a game of Scrabble to add that personal touch.

The Web site was born after its founder, Kiruba Shankar, randomly contacted bloggers in Mumbai to see if anyone would put him up. He found several. continue reading

see also:

  • ExtraBed on NDTV
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    Saturday, October 06, 2007

    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

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    Monday, October 01, 2007

    The BOBs - BEST OF THE BLOGS - My Electronic Library 2.0

    PS. If you see it deserves, vote this blog [request to circulate this message by Blogmaster Heyam Hayek, a Kids Librarian.]



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    Tuesday, June 05, 2007

    The Emerging-Semantics Web (”The Semantic Web is Dead”)

    Mor Naaman, a research scientist with Yahoo Research Berkeley, stood in front of a roomful of semantic Web researchers and declared that the semantic Web is dead. This happened last week at the International World Wide Web Conference in Alberta, Canada, as Naaman describes on the Yahoo Research Berkeley blog. [Search Engine Watch]

    The language used to describe the Semantic Web is complicated enough – at a glance, it looks a bit quantum theory-ish, just enough to make your eyes roll back into your head to look for ways to kill themselves – but Tim Berners-Lee, who's responsible for all those Ws littering your URLs, inspired enough faith that whatever the Semantic Web was, it could be accomplished. [Arguing The Semantic Web: Dead Or Just Not Alive?]


    May 16, 2007 on 10:24 am | by Mor Naaman, a research scientist @ Yahoo! Research Berkeley:
    Last week, I participated in a WWW2007 panel called “Multimedia Metadata Standards in a Semantic Web 3.0“, where I took the opportunity to declare the Semantic Web dead. As you can imagine, such a declaration in front of a crowd of semantic web researchers provoked many responses. While I believe panels should be provocative and entertaining, I also have specific reasons for why I went as far as calling the Semantic Web “dead”. Let me explain what I mean.

    There is no way that we can engage the masses in annotating media with “semantic” labels. At best, we can get the people to annotate content (such as Flickr images or YouTube videos) with short text descriptions or tags. This works only because tags are simple; powerful (can be used for many tasks) and, in some systems, carefully engineered to match the user’s natural motivations. Our best hope is to be able to take this bottoms-up annotation, or folksonomy if you will, and try to assign some semantics to it later - Flickr’s Clustering is a great example, as well as Y!RB’s TagMaps and our upcoming SIGIR paper (”Towards Automatic Extraction of Event and Place Semantics from Flickr Tags”, available in pdf)... continue reading

    See also my related posts:
  • WEB IS A FOREST ... SEMANTIC WEB A JAPANESE GARDEN ?
  • Seamless Structured Semantic Web -Will Tags, Clouds, Ontologies, Taxonomies, and Facet Analysis help?
  • Semantic Web and Facet Analysis

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  • Wednesday, May 23, 2007

    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

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  • Friday, May 04, 2007

    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
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