.."With zSHARE you can upload files, images, videos, audio and flash for free. Simply use the upload form below and start sharing! You can also use zSHARE as your personal file storage: backup your data and protect your files"..
.."I just took the print out of all the ids of books. And, those ppl worked hard to paste them all according to the excel sheet, ordering & categorizing the books, etc. Soundar has donated a book-shelf, few of my roommates dontaed some of the books. One of our members, Arun, donated the whole amt for all the 10 chairs"..
"Aziz Indori's private library, located in Khajrana area of Indore, boasts of several rare volumes and publications of Hindu epics such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in Portuguese, Urdu, Arabic and Persian languages."
..most librarians are portrayed as rather stuffy, repressed types, hellbent on enforcing the rules and naive about the real world..
1) Best locally relevant results served globally.
2) Keep it simple.
3) No manual intervention.
..Open source and digital education and learning, separately and together, aim to reach everyone. Although both movements have gained considerable maturity, a need for greater coordination exists..
..is a code of best practices that helps creators, online providers, copyright holders, and others interested in the making of online video interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use..
..webmasters, especially those at colleges and universities in Canada and US, do delink on a regular basis, and reasons for delinking include dead links, site outdated, site is poorly designed, and site’s content is of low quality. Given that most web search engines use the number of inlinks as one of the criteria in ranking search output, a site owner/webmaster should try to minimize the risk of the site being delinked from by other sites by ensuring that the site is well designed, rich in content, up-to-date, and if the site’s (or any of its pages) address changes, users are re-routed from the old address to the new address..
Firefox is one of my favourite software applications. It is a web browser like Internet Explorer. It is from Mozilla Application Suite, managed by the Mozilla Corporation. It uses open source Gecko layout engine and is compliant to current web standards. It is available for free for most operating systems like Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Its version 3.0 has been released recently on 17th June 2008, the day hyped as "Download Day 2008". It is a feature rich application, however I like its add-ons capability the most. There are around 2,000 add-ons (plug-ins) available to extend its functionality. Most of these add-ons are from third party developers.
Out of these 2,000 add-ons or Plug-ins, there are few which are useful for librarians and library users. You may like to see “100 Essential Firefox Add-Ons for Librarians” by Jessica Merritt. There are some more lists of add-ons by librarians. Like the one of Teri Vogel - My Favorite Firefox Extensions and he one by Jessamyn West - Pimp My Firefox. However I don’t feel all these add-ons are just for librarians alone. Most of these are good for even non-librarians. However, there are few, which are special for librarians. LibX is one such plug-in. Libraries can create their own edition of LibX to provide to access to their resource catalogues through LibX add-on. Around 422 academic and public libraries have already done so. Another interesting Plug-in is Zotero. It is an easy-to-use Firefox extension to help collection, management and cite Internet sources. There is a nice tutorial available for using LibX and Zotero in combination.
Firefox also has a built-in search box on the Navigation Toolbar, which has a drop-down box showing the available searches. These are created using search plug-ins. Search plug-ins are simple text files which are installed by adding them to the Mozilla Firefox searchplugins folder. Such a search plugin can be created for a library.
Librarians could experiment with thousands of available add-ons. Few months back I had advised a librarian to use an add-on for display a ticker for RSS feeds of current News.
There are many more add-ons waiting for getting used by librarians and library users.
..ImageOx provides free image sharing/hosting with a number for EXCLUSIVE features such as instant autorun CD Flash presentation, image galleries (albums), image slideshows, instant folder creation (image series), personal profiles and image management area with free user registration..
PMB has most of the functional modules essential for a library management system including Circulation; Cataloguing; Reports; Selective Dissemination of Information Service; Administration and Acquisition. It has friendly web interfaces for librarian and users and supports UNIMARC and Z39.50 standards. Some other features include - Barcode Generator; Multi Language Support and Import and export of bibliographic records in different formats.
"..Govt should make a rule, which should be applicable to all the universities and institutes across India, that we, the researchers of India should publish all the work in Indian Journals only. The journals may be peer-reviewed internationally. The journals may be available online free of cost, and free copies may be sent to major universities worldwide.."
The NIH Public Access Policy ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH funded research. It requires scientists to submit journal final peer-reviewed manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/). The Policy requires that these articles be accessible to the public on PubMed Central to help advance science and improve human health.
..Science is fallible, but clearly that’s not what makes it special. Science is special because it’s self-correcting. It isn’t self-correcting because individual scientists acknowledge their mistakes, accept correction, and change their minds. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. Science is self-correcting because scientists eventually correct the errors of other scientists, and find the evidence to persuade their colleagues to accept the correction, even if the new professional consensus takes more than a generation. In fact, it’s precisely because individuals find it difficult to correct themselves, or precisely because they benefit from the perspectives of others, that we should employ means of correction that harness public scrutiny and open access..
"PDF Files (up to 10 MB from your computer, 2 MB from the web)"
The "2.0" qualifier is more often used in the context where readers themselves create content in a collaborative manner on the interactive web media. I was looking for this angle in Joe Esposito's article. However, I was bit disappointed as this aspect was missing. There is no 1.0 in Open Access. In fact, Open Access itself is "Access 2.0". This movement is all about scholars making their own scholarly literature accessible to their scholarly peers.
What to know what a Blog is? This is one of the best resources to explain it.
.."ThoughtMesh is an unusual model for publishing and discovering scholarly papers online. It gives readers a tag-based navigation system that uses keywords to connect excerpts of essays published on different Web sites"..
Introduction:
Online discussion forums are one of earliest form of online communication among people with common interests. Many of these forums are meant for people associated with a profession. LIS-Forum (LIS-Forum, 2008) is such an email based discussion forum (list-serv) for Library and Information Science (LIS) Professionals. It has been there since 1995 (Rajashekar, 2002) and now has more than 4100 subscribers. This online forum is the most popular and oldest in India. It has wide spread subscription base among Library and Information Professionals from India. It also has decent subscribers from outside India. It would be matter of interest to know what these subscribers think of LIS profession. Why did they enter into this profession? Was it a pure chance, lack of alternatives or deliberate choice? What is their attitude towards the core philosophy of the profession? A brief survey was done on the subscribers in the month of April 2008 to get some insight on these issues. However, the basic objective of this survey was to demonstrate a feature of Google Docs’ online spreadsheet (Google Docs, 2008) that can be exploited to conduct online surveys.
Methodology:
An online questionnaire was created using Google Docs’ online spreadsheet (Singh, Conduct Research and Surveys Online: Design, Send and Get Results Directly in Spreadsheet Using Google Docs, 2008). Google Docs has a feature to create an online form and link back it to a spreadsheet on its server. The data entered through forms gets entered directly into this linked spreadsheet. The questionnaire can be sent directly through email to target survey participants. Most email clients and web based emails services can directly display the form in email of the recipients. The recipient can fill in the values and click on submit button. In case the form is not displayed properly, a link to the online form is always there for the recipient to visit and respond.
A very simple survey questionnaire (Singh, LIS Motivation Survey, 2008) was created. The objective was to collect only minimal but relevant information. No personal details were collected. Only four questions were asked. Three were close-ended questions where the respondents had to just click on options. The last question was open-ended asking comments from respondents. These questions were asked:
Your Age Group?
Your Occupation?
Why you choose LIS Profession?
Any comments?
The questionnaire was mailed to LIS-Forum. The LIS-Forum moderator approved the email containing the survey on 21st April 2008. The responses started pouring in from 11:01 A.M. First day saw most of the responses. On third day, the responses tampered to just three responses. However, responses kept pouring in even later. The last response that was included in the study is the 57th response received on 3rd May 2008.
Analysis:
Age Groups:
The responses were grouped age-wise. Most responses (42%) were from respondents in the age group of 25 -30 years. This was followed (30%) by those in the age group of 31-35. Thus this relatively young age group of 25 to 35 years combined together formed 72% of responses.
| Age Groups | Total |
| Above 60 | 1 |
| Between 25 - 30 | 24 |
| Between 31 - 35 | 17 |
| Between 36 - 40 | 2 |
| Between 41 - 45 | 4 |
| Between 46 - 50 | 3 |
| Between 51- 55 | 3 |
| Between 56 - 60 | 1 |
| Under 25 | 2 |
| Grand Total | 57 |
Occupations:
Most respondents (65%) were employed in LIS domain. Apart from these 10% were employed in LIS domain as well research students. While 7% more were doing correspondence courses to improve their qualifications while in service. Thus 82% of the respondents were employed in LIS domain. Only one (2%) respondent was working in non-LIS domain.
| Respondents’ Occupations | Total |
| Employed but LIS Student of Distant / Correspondence Course | 4 |
| Employed in LIS Domain | 37 |
| Employed in non-LIS Domain | 1 |
| Research Only | 2 |
| Research Only, Employed but LIS Student of Distant / Correspondence Course | 1 |
| Research, but Employed | 6 |
| Research, but Employed, Employed in LIS Domain | 2 |
| Retired | 1 |
| Student – MLIS | 1 |
| Student - MLIS, Employed in LIS Domain | 1 |
| Student - MLIS, Research, but Employed | 1 |
| Grand Total | 57 |
Reason for Joining Library and Information Science (LIS) Profession:
Interestingly, almost half (46%) of the persons said they loved the philosophy of LIS profession. Twenty percent of the people said that they joined the profession because jobs were / are easily available. About same number (23%) of people said that they did not care to know much it before joining.
| Reason for choosing LIS Profession | Total |
| I had to do something, What is your problem? | 2 |
| I loved the philosophy of the profession | 26 |
| I was employed in another field, studied LIS during job and now I am well off. | 1 |
| Jobs are / were easily available in LIS | 11 |
| Just joined it without caring what it is all about | 13 |
| Nothing better was available to me | 1 |
| Wanted to spend some more time at university | 2 |
| |
|
| Grand Total | 56 |
Breaking down responses by two major age groups (25-30 and 31-35) revealed an interesting fact. In 25-30 age group, 9 out of 24 (37.5%) respondents said that they did not care what the profession was all about while joining it. However, in the age group of 31-35, only 1 out of 16 (6.25%) said so. This gives an indication that people tend to love core philosophy of the profession with passage of time.
Respondents’ General Comments:
There was an open ended question asking comments of the respondents. Most of the people wanted to know the results of this survey. Some were with very positive comments towards the profession. At the same time, few were very critical about joining the profession. One person even thought to the extent that juniors are being exploited by their senior professionals.
Limitation of study:
The questionnaire had a very poor response. It would be risky to draw major conclusions from this study. This study can only reflect the views of active LIS-Forum subscribers who opted to respond.
Conclusion:
Though the response rate was poor, but still the study does tell about the attitude of active participants of the LIS-Forum who decided to respond promptly. Majority of the responses came within 48 hours. The methodology of the survey, that is using Google Docs, hence has been tested. This methodology works and thus can be used for online surveys. This study also showed that relatively young people from the age group of 25 to 35 years are active on online forum for LIS professionals. This active population either has positive attitude towards the philosophy of profession or consider LIS as a career. Moreover, their commitment and love towards the professional philosophy increases with time. Further studies on this issue are required. The spreadsheet containing the survey responses is being shared as open data to help future similar studies (LIS motivation survey: spreadsheet with survey responses, 2008). To maintain privacy, the comments field has been deleted from this spreadsheet.
Google Docs. (2008). Retrieved June 3, 2008, from http://docs.google.com/
LIS motivation survey: spreadsheet with survey responses. (2008, June 3). Retrieved June 3, 2008, from http://snipr.com/2bvu5
LIS-Forum. (2008). Retrieved June 3, 2008, from LIS-Forum: Discussion Forum for Library and Information Professionals in India: http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lis-forum
Rajashekar, T. (2002, Oct 1). LIS-Forum: A brief history. Retrieved June 1, 2008, from http://snipr.com/lishistory
Singh, S. (2008, April 25). Conduct Research and Surveys Online: Design, Send and Get Results Directly in Spreadsheet Using Google Docs. Retrieved June 1, 2008, from http://snipr.com/gdsurvey
Singh, S. (2008, April 19). LIS Motivation Survey. Retrieved June 1, 2008, from http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=p4GBbR26ZPytvtls2v-qhBw
How to tell them that there is a community that does things just for the sake of science and advancement of knowledge? This Community of academicians, scientists and scholars has different value system. Here, the reputations of community members largely depend upon papers they publish and references they get to these papers. So, they need to publish papers to remain relevant in the community. This helps them to get promotions and other career advancements. Scholarly papers are often based on original research done in systematic manner over a period of time. Research is never done in vacuum but is always based on existing knowledge. New research aims to extend the baseline of existing knowledge in a specific domain. This requires searching and ‘consumption’ of relevant scholarly papers related to their research. Once the research is completed, the results are included in manuscripts for getting published as articles in scholarly journals. Before an article can be published in a journal, it has to undergo a process called peer-review [8]. In this process, the manuscript submitted by authors is referred to two or three scholars working in similar area. Editorial board consisting of eminent scholars takes final decision to accept or reject paper based on comments of reviewers. It can also send back manuscripts to authors for modification and resubmission. So, it is the members of same scholarly community that are playing the roles of consumers (researchers and scholars) of previously published papers, producers (as authors) as well as quality controllers (as peer-reviewers and editorial board members). All these players are contributing to science and knowledge without seeking immediate monetary benefits. However academic publishing business is more often guided by commercial interests. Publishers insist on exclusive transfer of copyrights of authors in their favour. While authors of books, non-scholarly and popular literature negotiate in terms of royalties, scholarly authors give away their rights without caring much about monetary benefits. Thus, years of hard work is given away for free by scholars so that their papers can be published. The same is then sold back to the same community at a very high subscription rates.
Scholars, academicians and scientists need to access knowledge locked up in high cost journals for conducting new research. It is same knowledge which they themselves had created. It means, only those researchers and scholars can access this locked up knowledge whose employers and institutes can afford to purchase this knowledge. This creates inequalities of access to knowledge. That results in inequalities in efficiency of producing new knowledge. Poor and developing nation are most hit as they can not spend much on purchasing scholarly journals in foreign currencies to the level of developed countries.
Thanks to Internet, things are changing now. Research can be reported much quickly. Authors can submit their manuscripts online. Manuscript management and online publishing has become much easier especially with manuscript management systems like Open Journal System [9]. All processes, from assignment of peer-reviewers to bringing out a new issue can be done online. Which means journal publishing now is much cheaper and prompt. Number of online journals have come up in last decade. Even the traditional journals now have online versions. Wait, that does not necessarily means that what all is available online can be accessed for free. However many journals do provide free access to their full content. Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) [10] lists about 3390 open access journals. Out of which around 100 are from India [11]. These Open Access journals do whatever the traditional scholarly journals do for publishing peer-reviewed articles. Only difference is that they provide online access to anybody and everybody for free. Open Access journals are free to readers but obviously not free to produce. There are various business models for producing open access journals. Most professional societies have their official journals. These are distributed to society members. The parent society takes care of publication costs. Many such society journals have online version. These are normally accessible for free. In India, most online society journals come under this category. Then there are public funded organisations engaged in research and its promotion. These also publish research journals and make their online versions free. The best citied journal from India, Indian Journal of Medical Research [12], falls under this category. Somewhat controversial but successful model is being adopted by Open Access Publishers like PLoS [13] and BioMed Central [14]. Here once the article gets selected for publication after peer-review process, the author needs to pay a fee [15][16]. Popularity of such publishers with such a author-pays model sometime confuse people to belief that open access is all about author-pays and free-to-reader model of publishing. No, Open Access publishing of scholarly literature can be done through number of business models. The model adopted by publishers like PLoS and BioMed is just one of models.
There is one more route to open access. Here, the authors or other right holders retain [17] and exercise their right to self-achieve their papers in publically accessible digital repositories. These could be repositories run by their institutions (Institutional Repositories) or Subject Repositories allowing self-archiving without considering institutional affiliation of the authors. Number of universities, academic institutions and research funding agencies are making Open Access via such repositories mandatory [18]. Recently in U.S., NIH voluntary Public Access Policy has been made mandatory through an Act [19]. University faculties are becoming aware of benefits of archiving for open access, for example on 6th May 2008, Harvard Law faculty voted for 'open access' to their scholarly articles [20] through digital repositories. Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) had 1065 registered repositories with it as on 21st May 2008 worldwide [21].
I don’t know how much people in blogging or the wider domain of New Media know about this strange model of academic publishing. However bloggers, once made aware of it , can help open access movement [22] in number of ways. One way is to blog on Open Access itself. There are few already there and well established like the one by Peter Suber [7]. Some others which I know are OA Librarian [23]; The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics [24] and I will also mention the one from student community – Open Students: students for open access to research [25]. Second way is to blog about various open access resources. Every day, number of resources including journals, repositories, open courseware etc are launched and announced. These could be evaluated, annotated and listed under well planned categories (or tags) in a blog. Links of such tags or categories automatically collate resources into listings of related posts. It could be very similar to ‘Digital Scholarship’ [26]. Third way has to do more with subject experts. Scientists and Scholars can blog on how to promote open access within their own subject domain. Open Access Anthropology: Promoting Open Access in Anthropology [27] is beautiful example. Very similar concept has been highlighted in a presentation - Blogging Archaeology: creating an Open Access source for knowledge [28]. Fourth way is to blog about Peer-Reviewed Research. All such blog posts can be aggregated at one place [29]. There could be many more ways to promote Open Access through blogging.
Further Readings:
Guidelines, primers, recommendations, and best practices for publishers of open-access journals
Just wondering whether Google Reader is gradually evolving into a Social Networking Site? It has now improved its Sharing options. It has become easier to share your favorite sites with your friends. It provides for a “Note in Reader” link that can be dragged and dropped in your browser’s bookmarks bar. Once that is done, you are ready to share your favorite sites or the sites you just discovered. Select a relevant portion of the site you wish to share through Google Reader and click on “Note in Reader”. (Well text selection is optional, but it is also better to be focused). A window will open up with title of the site being shared with selected text already filled. Now just put your annotation (yet another optional step) about the site (your friends might like to know as why you are sharing?) and click “Post Item”. You have now shared an item through Google Reader. You can email the links of shared items to your friends, share through your blog (ready to add clip in Blogger available) or copy and paste relevant HTML snippet in your site.
Will Google Reader continue to add such features and evolve into a Social Networking Site? It can add profiles, favorite contacts, communities, pictures and all that stuff. With all these usual social networking stuff powered with shared knowledge (sites), Google Reader could become “Google Wisdom” for a participating virtual community.
