key 2 information

Cloud Computing - a new buzz

2010-11-26T16:36:00.002+05:30

These days we are hearing about cloud computing a lot, though this phrase has been in discussion for a decade now. This is the most talked phrase being used recently, after the ‘Web2.0’ hype. I am trying to peep into the basic idea of this hardcore buzz and to know what it is all about. After exploring few articles I got amazed that unknowingly I have been using ‘cloud computing’ as some of the web services since a long.

Introduction:

Cloud computing is a latest buzz all around with respect to web technologies and services. As web 2.0, this phrase is also being defined differently but the basic idea is almost same. In which users are getting web services on free or priced manner from service providers located at remote places.

Cloud computing seems to be a new phrase but looking into the concept, we all have been using it since quite a long., e.g. email services of yahoo, google, sify or others, YouTube and, Google Docs etc. are embedded with the ‘cloud computing’. These services are free and we have also been putting important information on our email IDs, youtube, flicker, and now few social networks (facebook etc.) where we have been sharing or shifting our personal information or data in different formats on the web. All these servers holding our information on the web can be metaphorically treated as clouds.

The ideal crux is, when we are directly or indirectly shifting our personal or organizational data on the servers which offer their services (web services, infrastructural services or application's platform) free of cost or on payment, is called ‘cloud computing’. In simple terms, our data which has stored over the Internet (virtual place) and can be accessible 24x7.

Areas of Cloud Computing:

Cloud computing is again still searching for an established definition but as of now it means using web services of others to satisfy users' computing needs, like – software applications, data storage and using different platforms to build needed applications. On basis of this cloud computing can broadly be divided in following three segments:

Software as a Service (SaaS): In this application or software is given as service to users, who can access the required programme online. For example email and few other services offered by Google, Hotmail, Yahoo, Sify, Skype etc.

Platform as a Service (PaaS): To run required service a special platform or application infrastructure is also being provided to the clients where clients can build their web based applications. Client does not require to know programming language, database management systems, etc. to run applications. Windows Azure, Google App Engine and Force.com can be few of good examples of PaaS.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): In IaaS, clients are being offered with storage, networking and processing of data. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or Simple Storage Service (S3), VMWare vCloud are some of its examples.

Inspite of using cutting edge technologies in ‘cloud computing’, still we are in debate of its use in our official systems. Therefore, following pros and cons have been observed which may broadly be focused upon.

+tive:

All time accessibility of data.
Technical problems related to storage and accessibility can be taken care by the providers.
No need of procuring high capacity storage server.
User does not have to download and install any update on his/her desktop.
User does not have to be master of the applications used in ‘cloud computing’

-tive:

Security of data is the major concerned.
Need high capacity bandwidth while accessing subscribed services.
You can lose control on your information or data.
What happen when stored data get lost?

Use of cloud computing is depend on person to person and organization to organization. Storing personal data or information on other’s servers may not going to effect anyone else except you but where shifting or storing organizational data on other servers may effect everyone associated with that organization. Library is a service oriented system, which need high speed IN and OUT processing of data. It is good when data from these web based clouds is accessible to users but what will happen when we see any cloud burst?

Now question arises, how do we use and where we use ‘cloud computing’ in libraries, we would discuss the same in our next post.

Trends in E-Publishing

2010-07-30T14:13:00.006+05:30

Since few months, I was glued with the thinking to write something for this web space of mine. Though, one or other thing has been keeping me busy in my library. At present, new academic session has just started and visits of various publishers’ representatives are also accelerated. Though, recession has made its impact on every walk of life and publishing industry has not been spared from it. Publishers are always been the front runners to adopt and execute new ideas with state of the art services. They are the trend setters in terms of mode of publications and providing various new services. The new trends are not only helpful for the end user but also are quite interesting too. One can derive easily some lines towards the trend in which this industry has been moving ahead. Here are the few points I would like to discuss, which I feel are setting up new ways of marketing in publishing industry.

Trends in Print Publishing Industry (For Books):

Providing complementary copy of latest edition to the concerned faculty members.
Providing soft copy of instructor manual (PPT instruction file) to the faculty members.
Customized publishing: Publishers are printing one customized volume for the contents which normally appear in 2-3 different volumes. Yes, involvement of copyright issues is there, so publishers are customizing their own publications.
Expert talks: Publishers are arranging a talk of author, on the book written by him/her. It is a sort of workshop for the readers to introduce them about the book and its features.
Alerting all library professionals and faculty members through mailing lists.
Most of the publishers are coming out with low price edition for their original products, especially in the case of textbooks.

Trends in Print Publishing Industry (Journals/Magazines):

Publishers are offering gifts on subscription/renewal.
Bulk purchase on discounted price also being offered.
Most of the journals/magazines are offering online access with print.
Print versions are generally being replaced with online.

Trends in Electronic Publishing:

E-Publishing has an advantage to disseminate information in various formats and form of documents, viz. e-books, e-journals, e-newsletters and e-reports etc in more dynamic or interactive manner within a fraction of second. This is one of its core advantages, other than the cost saving in publishing and has tremendous capacity of data storage.

Apart from above qualities of e-publishing or e-resources, following practices are also being commonly used by publishers.

They are offering Print + electronic format of the subscribed contents.
Article based procurement is also possible. Publisher will charge for the articles downloaded during one year.
Most of the publishers offer ‘COUNTER’ compliance usage statistics for the subscribed products.
To facilitate the end user, publishers are offering login IDs and passwords to access the contents from home apart from IP based access. “Athens” and “Shibboleth” services for off campus access are also being offered.
Publishers are making end user aware through various training and awareness programmes.
Provision of consortia based subscription.

E-publishing under Open Access:

Open access comes as a revolution in electronic publishing. Most of the publishers are now participating in this revolution by one or other way. The few basic reasons to participate in the Open Access are:

Publication gets wider reader base as well as publicity.
It is also a way of social service. Publishers by offering one or more journal/s as open access, contribute in social development or development of humanity.
Authors are also inclined towards writing for open access because of its wider circulation.

Trends in Information Access:

Offline access (Through CD ROMs, etc.) has already been diminished. The benefits of online access are more than the offline, so, publishers are fully concentrating on providing access to end users over the Internet. Few access modes are being discussed below:

Login ID/Password: This access is beneficial for an individual user or within a small group of people. Though, it can be passed on to anyone and usage statistics can not be assessed user wise, in case of more than one user.

IP based access: This mode of access is generally adopted by big institutions. Most of the consortium subscription is based on access through IP range of the institute or member institutions. Analysing usage of member institutions becomes very easy. Though drawback of this mode of access is, users can access subscribed contents within the decided range of IPs only.

Third party access mode: This mode of access gives flexibility to access the contents from anywhere over the Internet. In this, a unique ID and password is given to every authorized user. Usage statistics can be obtained easily for every ID independently. These days, services of Athens and Shibboleth are commonly used for this specific purpose.

There are various other issues related to e-publishing are need to be discussed, like copyright issues, technical aspect of e-publishing, Economics of e-publishing etc. The discussion on these will be taken care in due course of time.

Access to Indian Electronic Theses and Dissertations (Indian ETDs)

2010-07-28T13:49:00.006+05:30

Shodhganga: a Reservoir of Indian Theses - An Initiative of INFLIBNET

National research output is for the use of the nation irrespective of cast, creed and location of the end user. With this objective, some of the countries have already started giving open access to their Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) over the Internet for the use of academic community around the globe. ETDs help in minimizing duplication of research work, minimizing plagiarism, giving visibility and world-wide access to the research work.

INFLIBNET is on Role:

In India, the UGC, through its notification (Minimum Standards & Procedure for Award of M.Phil./ Ph.D Degree, Regulation, 2009 of dated 1st June 2009), has entrusted INFLIBNET Centre the task of implementing and executing Indian ETDs on public domain with state-of-the-art technologies. This notification is for submission of electronic version of theses and dissertations to INFLIBNET with an aim to facilitate open access to Indian theses and dissertation to the academic community world-wide.

Subsequently, to accomplish this ambitious project, INFLIBNET set-up Shodhganga@INFLIBNET (Shodhganga: a reservoir of Indian Theses) by using DSpace, an open source digital repository software developed by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in partnership between Hewlett-Packard (HP).

Shodhganga@INFLIBNET provides a platform for research students to deposit their Ph.D. theses and make it available to the entire scholarly community in open access. However, it is possible to impose restrictions on access as a special case, if so desired by the university / research scholar. The repository has the ability to capture, index, store, disseminate and preserve ETDs submitted by the researchers. Universities are required to sign an MoU with the INFLIBNET Centre to participate in the Shodhganga project.

Shodhganga can be accessed at http://ietd.inflibnet.ac.in/ or http://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/

Following is the National Committee for Implementation of Submission and Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations in Universities in India.

Dr. Jagdish Arora, Director, INFLIBNET Centre Chairman (ex-officio)

Dr. Renu Batra, Joint Secretary (IUC), UGC Member

Dr. S. Majumdar, Librarian, Delhi University Member

Prof. I.V. Malhan, DLIS, Jammu University Member

Dr. Pawan Gupta, Dy. Librarian, Rajasthan University Member

Prof. Raman Nair, Librarian, M G Univ. Member

Prof. S.P.Thyagarajan, Former Vice-Chancellor, Madras University Member

Prof. V D Srivastav, Librarian, IIT Kanpur Member

Dr. S. Venkadesan, Librarian, IISc, Bangalore Member

Dr. R. Samyukha Ravi, Librarian, Pondicherry University Member

Prof. A R D Prasad, DRTC, Bangalore Member

Shri Yatrik Patel, Scientist-C (CS), INFLIBNET Centre Member

Mr. Manoj Kumar K, Scientist-D (CS), INFLIBNET Convener

For more detail please visit: http://ietd.inflibnet.ac.in/

LIBRARY 4.0

2009-11-24T14:12:00.004+05:30

ICT with various newly emerged technologies, artificial intelligence of semantic and controlled Web would bridge all communication barriers of a person in every walk of life. Web 4.0 will comprise all services and tools of web 3.0 supported with artificial intelligence. In this, web itself analyse the information and will generate new ideas and theories which would be communicated to the people of the same subject areas.

Web 4.0 would be a different world for an individual and it will bring like minded people together despite of different locations. It will notify the researchers with the relevant information over PC or mobile about the ongoing research or discussion on the same topic on which s/he is working for.

Library 4.0:
Whole web will be known as library and will be called as learning web. Everything placed on the web will get a unique location and web itself synthesis and analyse every part of the published content. Open Access system gets more encouragement and library 4.0 will divide the web into two parts “learning web” and “Spamming or Trashing web”. In this, ‘learning web’ will work as a ‘gigantic open virtual library’ with higher precision value and academicians will go with this. ‘Spamming or Trashing Web’, will be for the whole garbage available over the Internet which would cover recreational part of Internet. Libraries need to work in network or in collaboration with various professional networks. None of the individual library will survive in the 4.0 generation of web.

Role of a Librarian:
It is understood librarians have to be essentially techno savvy in 4th generation of web but they need to have expertisation on analysing the relevant information demanded by their users. Apart from tracking latest happenings in core areas of their users they would need to keep track on user’s online visits over the Internet which s/he will perform for the sake of learning. User’s visits over the web would lead the librarians to negotiate with information agencies and commercial publishers about the used information but after the information used by the users.

Nutshell:

Web 4.0 or Library 4.0 is yet in imaginations, which is getting developed day by day with the acceleration of ICT. Emergence of new technologies will demand librarianship with virtue of systematic and dedicated practices. Library 4.0 will accommodate (club) many of the services which are today, working in separate or independent domains. No doubt this generation of libraries will face lot of challenges from the users as well as technologies because whole web will give a desired virtual library system.

Library 3.0

2009-09-02T22:48:00.006+05:30

(We are approaching web 3.0 very fast, the desires and expectations from the ICT have already started giving shape to this generation of web. Consequently Library 3.0 envelops lot of challenges to the librarians as well as new dimensions to the profession. In this post we tried to put our views on the Web 3.0 and Library 3.0, which may not be accepted by many of the professionals. The discussion we are keeping open for all professionals or individuals and request them to put across their comments and views on the discussion, if they have any. )

We have talked about Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 in our earlier posts. The web generations which have given the existence to library 1.0 and library 2.0. Nowadays we can see discussions about web 3.0 are mushrooming in various discussion groups and forums. Before moving to library 3.0, lets share few words about Web 3.0 and what does it mean to us?

We have been experiencing applications of vibrant and dynamic technologies in Web 2.0 generation which stimulated our expectations and demanding more computing and analyzing intelligence from next generation of the Web. Since, Web 2.0 has been working with the aim to give social synchronization through groups, wikis, blogs, communities, forums and social networks. It brings individual whether a professional or general in contact with known and unknown people. In this people are sharing their thoughts, comments, feedbacks and scraps to be remained in touch with each others. Therefore, in broader sense we can say that Web 2.0 is bringing Individual together and information scattered all over the web. Whereas it is being expected that Web 3.0 will bring information together. Application of mashup technologies will give us the virtual world of Information in which web will be strengthen with more computing and analyzing powers through artificial intelligence. In Web 3.0 all created profiles and browsing history of an individual put together, on basis of analyzing the contents, computer will come out with the result needed by that particular individual. In this sense, two individuals will get different output while searching on a same query. Web will produce the result by knowing searcher’s flavor of information through analyzing his/her profiles and browsing history. Web 3.0 will work with more web semantic technologies, today hidden web or invisible web is a matter of concern and it is also being expected that it will not be there in Web 3.0.

Definition about Web 3.0 is in discussions these days, whereas a valid definition is yet to be established. Though, Web 3.0 set up the linking between data, various devices to exchange, analyse and find the data and finally establishes the linking between all users of web. This is quite an interesting debate that how web 3.0 is going to be implemented in libraries? To understand this we can say, Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 are completely based on the computer experts who showed these generations of web to all of us. Use of dynamic contents, blogs, social networks, tagging, wikis, podcasts and mashup technologies on web is a common application but information is scattered and unorganized all over the web. Now, Web 3.0 will prominently be based up on the librarians, for organizing this scattered or unorganized information. The application of semantic technologies and ontologies will be the key aspects in this generation of web.

Applications of Web 3.0 in Libraries

Since, features of web 3.0 are little hazy but being a user and organizer of information, speed, accuracy, precision and systematic organization of information available on the web are the most desirable elements of Library 3.0. Below, we are describing few of the prominent features or aspects of library 3.0 generation in brief:

Semantic Web: Semantic web will provide us with the option to share, unite, search and organize the web information in easy manner. Sharing and organizing information available in every corner of the web, which is the main aim of this generation and expected to be achieved with the help of semantic web technologies.

OPAC: In library 3.0, Web OPACs of various libraries which are forming a part of visible or invisible web would be brought together. Metadata of contents (contents in any format) would seamlessly accessible and searchable from single user friendly interface, just the way a ‘Portal’ provides one stop shop for various contents in present generation.

Ontologies: These are the techniques to give richer semantic relationships between terms and thoughts of knowledge. These give more standardization in managing the web contents instead of merely indexing the terms. Ontology aims at how the information is organized rather than organizing the information. Librarians can adopt various ontological techniques to define the web contents in more professional as well as personal manner.

Ubiquitous contents: The ubiquitous computing offers various contents which can be used or re-used frequently and will also not get absolute in near future. The contents of this generation need to be created in various formats and can also be easily shared, transferred and accessible through all modes of communication. Ubiquitous contents are the personal contents of the people persistently stored on the web in form of movies, blog posts, RSS feeds, wikis, stories, articles, music, games, etc. These are always there on the web and accessible from everywhere over the Internet through all mobile and Internet accessible devices.

GeoTagging: This helps users to find specific information located at specific location. It is simply a marking of various media or digital contents like images, photographs, video, websites or RSS feed etc. Most of the cellphones and mobile devices have GPS (Global Positioning System) facilities, which allowing users to add metadata exactly where the data or image or video was created. So tagging helps users to mark their information in which they are interested for.

Virtual Reference Service: Since technology is developing very fast in all domains, librarians are more determined to serve the users who are away from the libraries. In virtual reference service, apart from helping the users in personal or telephonic way, librarians are now developing the contents which can easily be transferable and readable in cellphones and other mobile devices to help the users at any point of time.

Librarians: In Library 3.0 is not only to provide the service to the people but it is serving the user with various services. They should know how to get the requested information and make it available to the user without concerning about the location. They should also help the users to make use of the given information. Librarians will have to work on the alternative way of providing information if one mode of communication gets failed.

In Nutshell: We are in the unorganized set of web contents these days but in library 3.0 to establish these unorganized web contents into a systematic and organized way. The most important sphere of library 3.0 is to establish a semantic relationship between all available web contents to ensure seamless accessibility, search-ability, availability and usability. Librarians need to be more inclined towards the use of latest tools and technology to create virtual library system. But basic aim remains the same i.e. ‘right information to the right user at the right time’.

LIBRARY 2.0

2009-07-31T18:02:00.004+05:30

In simple words, application of Web 2.0 in libraries is known as Library2.0 or L2. Therefore, it is important to have a discussion on Web2.0 at first before moving further. During the year 2000, when web under ‘dot com’ was getting crumbled up with the concept and general consideration that web is for publishing only. Even in this situation O’Reilly Media Inc. under the leadership of its founder Tim O’Reilly come out as strong believer of web. This group has highlighted the web as dynamic platform for productive communication, especially in the area of business and marketing. Web 2.0 is a term originally coined by Dale Daugherty and Tim O’Reily in the year 2004 during a brainstorming session of a special conference organized to discuss the future of web and emerging techniques.

Web2.0 is being defined differently by the experts, few say it is a technology which provides lively experience to the users while using the Internet and few say it is an advance stage of Internet. Other say it is optimum use of technologies over the Internet and few considered it as propaganda for Internet marketing. Though, web 2.0 is a user-centred web, where blogs, wikis, social networks, multimedia applications, dynamic programming scripts are being used for collection, contribution and collaboration concepts on the web.

Library 2.0
The term Library 2.0 is coined by Michael Casey in 2006. Various library professionals have defined the term differently but in general we can say that application of web 2.0 in libraries is known as Library 2.0. Now question arises how libraries have come into Web 2.0 business and this question is being discussed in many professional platforms. To answer this question, Five Laws of Library Science given by Dr. S R Ranganathan about a century ago are absolutely valid to justify transformation of libraries into Library 2.0. The laws are:

Information is for use (Books are for use)
Every user his/her information (Every reader his/her book)
Every information its user (Every book its reader)
Save the time of the user (Save time of the user)
The library is a growing organism (The library is a growing organism)

These laws are strictly showing users as centric force of any library system. First law recommends proper use of information. Second and third laws address right information to the right user and also about alert services. Forth law is asking to use new tools and technologies so librarians can save the time of user as well as library staff. Fifth law shows the broad spectrum of library system which is infinitive in nature and also recommending use of latest technologies, tools, services and methods as required to give vibrant and dynamic shape to the library system.

Web 2.0 in the libraries

Library website: Library 2.0 is offering dynamic websites for the libraries which embedded with semantic web and interoperability of various tools and techniques. Few of them are as:

Streaming media: Streaming technology takes care of multimedia files over the Internet. It is the streaming of video and audio media that incorporate more interactive, media-rich facets. With the help of streaming media users can interact with library staff or their teachers as they interact in classrooms or instruction labs.

Mashups: Mashup is a hybrid application of the web which integrates information from different sources at one platform. In simple words it is an application that combines data or functionality from two or more external sources to create a new service. Mashup is the technology which integrates all applications of web 2.0 at single platform.

Podcast: Padcast defined as “a digital media file or collection of files that is distributed over the Internet periodically and made available for download by means of web syndication”. The files can be played back on a computer or personal player i.e. Ipod or mobile etc.

OPAC:

Tagging: This makes information searching easier on the Internet. In which users can create and change the metadata, especially subject headings to the contents. This acts like an open catalogue to the information. In this users can give subject headings to their interested documents/ contents and also write reviews of the contents. In web OPAC system users can tag their interested documents and also write comments and reviews on interested documents.

Alert Services:

Instant Messaging: In simple words it is known as “Chat”, through this chat reference library users can interact with librarians on library related issues as they would interacting face to face. Instant messaging reference service is being used successfully and expertly in libraries.

Social Networks: Social networking is the most promising and most talked technology of present days. This allows people to create virtual communities (personal or professional) over the internet for interaction. Social Networks are online communities where people meet, socialize, exchange digital files, etc. Facebook, MySpace, Orkut and Flickr are few popular examples of Social Networks. Libraries can also start their social network about latest books or documents in the libraries where users can discuss or comments on the contents being contained by these books or documents. This can not be only restricted to books or other documents even library services and activities can also be discussed through this.

Publishing:

Blog: Jorn Barger coined ‘Blog’ in the year 1997 and blogs are being considered as a great milestone in the history of web publishing. This is a sort of personal web site featuring diary-type commentary, simple web posts and links to articles or other web sites. This is being frequently updated and gives chronological arrangement of the posts. For easy search each entry or post can be tagged with keyword and description. Libraries can start their blogs to encourage interactions amongst users and library staff. Blog can also be used for promoting activities and services of the libraries. It allows two ways interaction where users can also make comment on the posted information.

Wikis: This is like an open web page and who have access permission can publish or edit the information on these wabpages by using their browsers. Professional communities are using wikis as reference guides that reflect the collective knowledge of the community. Wikipedia is the excellent example of this service. Libraries can open their webpages in the wikis and can promote social interaction among librarians and library users.

Notices:

RSS Feeds: RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is the technology which facilitates users to keep track of new updates on selected websites. This technology normally is being seen in blogs and wikis but now almost all the websites are using this technology. To facilitate the users, libraries have already started using this technology to keep them up to date with the latest happening in chosen websites. It enables users to have customized personal pages that contain contents of various other websites which would of their use.

In nutshell:
Application of Web 2.0 in libraries has taken the libraries into next generation. Library 2.0 is completely user centric which provokes libraries to share the resources collectively. It is important for the librarians to experience Web 2.0 tools from a user’s perspective and use these tools in modernizing library services. Therefore, librarians have to techno-savvy in today’s world of information and technology.

Library 1.0

2009-07-08T18:02:00.006+05:30

When O’Reilly Media coined the web2.0 term, then only we come to know about existence of web1.0 in the cyber world. In this post, we would not directly put ourselves into web2.0 instead we discuss about web1.0 which had given the base to library1.0 concept in the libraries.

The first phase of WWW (World Wide Web) is called web1.0. In general, term web1.0 comes into the picture after the emergence of web2.0. It could be defined as one-way communication over the Internet. In which static web pages were used with the help of basic form of HTML. It was commonly used for publishing basic information, introduction and activities of any organization, institute or other systems. User can read this information but had to use e-mail or other mediums to react on the contents written over these static web pages, that means there was not any direct user interaction on published contents or information.

Application of web1.0 in the libraries is known as library1.0. Librarians started applying web1.0 to inform its user about the library, its services and activities. Gradually, use of web1.0 in the library got boost with the interoperability of library automation system. Optimum and extensive use of web in library services later on framed the thought of virtual library system.

Following are the activities of library1.0

Library web-page/site: Libraries started creating websites to inform users about the library, library rules & regulations, procedures, user privileges and services which are being rendered.

OPAC: Use of integrated library management software offered access to catalogue of the library at local area network.

Alert Services: New arrivals and other documentation services were also offered through simply publishing a list on the website on routine basis.

Publishing: Libraries were publishing annual reports, reports and analysis on library usage etc on the web.

Notice: Notices for users in static form were also incorporated through the website. The use of HTML basic tags like 'blink' and 'marquee' etc. were quite prominent for highlighting notices and alert services.

In nutshell, library1.0 was simply the way of publishing library related information to the users with the help of basic HTML. In library1.0 generation library users were unable to do anything except reading out and managing print copies of those pages. User interaction part was not there in this generation. But cutting edge technology replaced the web1.0 with web2.0 for dynamic and interactive discussion between information provider and information seeker. Finally web2.0 emerged that changed access of information from the library blocks to user’s desktops.

KOSMIX v/s Google

2009-06-05T00:50:00.015+05:30

Introduction:

Search engines play an important role in the age of information, speed and quality, when everybody needs right information, at the right moment in fractions of a second. Though, electronic information contents have gone beyond text to image, audio, video and various other

formats and being uploaded over the Internet for public or restricted use. In order to capture all these contents in different formats search engines are working on cutting edge technologies and coming up with one or other specialties. In the emergence of various search engines the KOSMIX come up with its unique feature of systematic categorization of web. KOSMIX as described through our earlier post entitled Does KOSMIX challenge the Google or Librarians?, is undoubtedly has been launched with the aim to “tell more about something”. In proper sense it is a browse engine or more appropriately we can defined it as an explore engine which has already revolutionized the searching on the web. It was created by Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, who studied at Stanford University along with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

KOSMIX has been known as a challenger to Google even when it was not fully developed. KOSMIX has an incredibly long and challenging road ahead of it if wants to compete against Google. The other side Google is the foundation stone in the era of search engines, itself facing the challenge from these new generation search engines, when these new emerging search engines are researching on half explored services of existing search engines to make their products unique and revolutionary.

Here, we are trying to put light on the KOSMIX v/s well known giant the great Google in this information age.

Indexing and searching:

KOSMIX is containing all features which a search engine should need to have but unique way of searching which separates it from other search engines. Google is a Giant but sometime it gives frustrations while searching. It has been observed that sometime it diverts users from the actual topic on which he/she started searching and reached somewhere else. Google gives high ranked (ranking given by Google itself) documents as result on a specific term or phrase whereas KOSMIX gives the documents which give more information on a specific term or phrase. The basics of output in both these search engines are completely different. KOSMIX gathers contents from across the web in most systematic and organized way in and categorize them in different subject categories.

While searching for “e-learning objects”, Google has given output from web pages only and to get results from blog, images, video and news categories, searched one by one separately. We put the same query in KOSMIX and received output in boxes with link to explore further option. It compiles the output from different sources, webpages, videos, images, wikies, blogs, and conversational entries and suggests various other related links too.

KOSMIX is known as an explore engine which discovers the accurate topics related to the term searched for. Accurate and relevant searching is the most exceptional key of KOSMIX, which work like a boon for information seekers and learners who were dithering from the Google due to low precision value. It does not displayed own published contents but it fetch the results from other search engines, like Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Flicker etc.

The above table shows, though KOSMIX is only 6 months infant but already challenging Google in many of its services. Since Google has already achieved the greatness and become a giant in the business, therefore, it is quite true that KOSMIX has to go long way to compete with the Great Google.

Comment:

The limitation of KOSMIX is that it gives 4-5 results from each section and to explore further it takes us to other search engines like “more from the Google” or “more from the Youtube”. We found that KOSMIX gives results from the first result page of other sources, but organized them in such a way that most of the times it seems the output is given by a professional on searched term.

After moving away from result of KOSMIX with the option ‘more from …….’, this takes the users to another search engines and after sometime user forget that he/she was using KOSMIX. Then again flat one dimensional listing of search output come in front of us.

Suggestion:
Instead of compiling and displaying one page entries, KOSMIX should think to increase number of entries to make good grip on user’s psyche. KOSMIX should have not let the user moves to other search engines.

It should look up to search within the result option.
It should have to reveal the different sub-subjects categories under different subject categories, e.g. under which subject category the term ‘library’ appears.
There is no help option to guide the user in searching or browsing the KOSMIX. It should provide some links to refer the user to explore further options.
Since, KOSMIX is not allowing users to search/browse in one format (content’s format) only, like video, image, blog, web or other organized segments. It should give the liberty to user to search with in the single format (images or videos etc.) from the categorized contents.
It should suggest correct spelling while entering of wrong spelling, and also refers towards more sought terms to search the web.
While searching it should show the browsing path to reach at that term or phrase and also show the different subject categories containing the same term or phrase.

Endnotes:

KOSMIX is guide to web, user can browse the topics in the different subject categories. To give accurate and more relevant search, whatever users want over the Internet it categorizing whole web into different categories, that helps to provide automatic indexing of contents that makes searching more intuitive and result looks like given by an expert on related to searched topic. And one can send the links of search results through the email, this way helping the user to organize the information for further use. RightHealth and MeeHive are the services those have already given the new way of web organization and searching. Finding relevant information from the web with highest precision value KOSMIX has already sent the example but it would be more advisable if it stresses upon federated search and give long output from its own organized contents instead of restricted it from 4 or 5 entries of different segments. KOSMIX has all the ingredients and potential to challenge the Google if it adopts constant improvement and develop it to facilitate the academics.

The Great Google – imposing supreme challenge to the professionals

2009-05-16T13:58:00.012+05:30

In this discussion we are going to talk about the ‘Google’. It is the search engine which is being used most extensively all around the world to explore the web. We are unable to get the accurate size of Google in terms of how much web contents it possesses but it is immense in size. Google does not search everything which is published over the Internet, even though this enveloping much higher part of the web than covered by any other search engine. The most interesting aspect of Google is that it works with the practical parts of the society by putting itself in every walk of life. For example, Google is working with Information and Library Network Centre (INFLIBNET) to make union catalogues (databases), which are being maintained by the Centre, available through the Google. This is really a fascinating way to help the society by giving access to the information which is known as invisible web. What else user wants – an easy and free access to the information. It is not only challenging the library and information science professionals alone but imposing challenge to the professionals of all spheres. It has millions of full text books giving challenge to the publishing and distributing industries, covering more than 25,000 news sources which give challenge to the media professionals, writers, translators, cartographers, Information technology professionals are also not left estranged from professional challenges to them. In true sense Google is keeping professionals on their toes by imposing supreme challenge.

Introduction:
Birth of Google started with the phrase “Having a healthy disregard for the impossible”. Sergey Brin and Larry Page In 1998 Google launched with the aim to provide some accuracy while searching with its PageRank system. In this PageRank system, Google provides higher rank to important pages and high ranked pages appear at the top of the search results.

Google has been showing its presence in all spheres of globalization. From simple searching to Google Map, Advertisements etc. it has reached to access of scholarly literature through book search, Google scholar etc. Day by day it is achieving new heights of success in each and every domain.

Indexing and Searching:
Google is not only searching billions of web pages but also providing precision value while searching. It offers flexibility by using various symbols and Boolean logic (e.g. “”, +, - OR, AND etc.) and various other techniques to get more precision value. Google indexing and searching works in very systematic order. Google has a web crawling robot called Googlebot, which finds the web-pages and hand over the retrieved information to ‘Google Indexer’. Google Indexer is a huge index database which is sorted alphabetically with each index entry storing a list of documents in which the term appears within the text and its specific location.
Google does not index common words like the, is, on, of, how, why, some punctuations and multiple spaces etc. The query analyzer of Google called ‘query processor’ which has comprises with user interface, search engine that evaluates queries and results formatter. The query processor compares the search query with index terms and recommends the related documents. With the help of PageRank system, the page containing higher rank is more likely to appear at the top in the output. It also uses machine-learning techniques with in the stored data, to improve its performance automatically. For example, the spelling correction system uses the same technique and suggests alternative spellings. It also allows using formulas for calculation and unit conversions etc. Various options for simple as well as advance searching are being provided to help users.

Comments:
Being a librarian I feel Google imposes a biggest challenge to the library professionals particularly in the area of electronic information. It is a most dynamic and vibrant search engine which is undoubtedly a leader in the world of search engines. While searching anything on the web, routinely Google comes in mind. The simple search with advance searching techniques is its beauty and searching loads of information is quite easier and user friendly, even a layman can search accurate information. Search for location, unit conversation, weather details, book search, image and video search, article search, synonyms, web-publishing, advertisements and in all domains of web-life, presence of Google can be felt easily. Earlier librarians were known as information searching experts and initially they dominated Google by rejecting it’s below standardized indexing techniques. But now Google is dominating library profession by using same indexing techniques in different databases for excellent output accuracy. For researchers and academicians it’s ‘Book Search’ and ‘Google Scholars’ are giving access to billions of books and articles. Easy access to the information and article search options giving ‘virtual library’ shape to the Google. This lets academic community using Google widely. Google has become a prominent reason which cut shorted the user’s visit in the libraries in search of information.
Suggestions:
Goolge is in true sense envisaging the picture of library without walls or a virtual library. It would be good if Google provide option to choose areas to search, like selecting several vertical areas while making search. For example if I would like to search with in the blog, video, images and book search domains only then I have to search separately in all required databases or have to use general search option. In general search it would give output from all databases collectively (like news, video, images, Google scholar, book search etc.). Therefore, user will be provided the key to select his/her databases while making any new search. Google may also come out with another new database of “open access journals/magazines” which would only covers journals/magazines available freely on the web. The same way it can also think of giving single window searching option to the institutional repositories available openly on public domains.

Endnote:
There is no exaggeration in saying ‘Google is the reflection of web-of-universe’. It is the highly used search engine of present era. We can observe creations of specialized search engines all around which are coming with specialized features. Though all these search engines needs decades to achieve the success Google has achieved. Librarians are known as techno-savvy group of professionals but they are in dilemma to approve Google as a boon or ban for the libraries in general and library profession in particular. Though the underline factor is that Google is reaching to the users and helping them to explore the web-of-universe by this it is achieving the objectives which librarians dreamed.

The world of search engines

2009-05-13T23:39:00.005+05:30

Latest Trends in Libraries - A Discussion (Part - II)

Being an information provider, Internet always fascinates me and seems like an unexplored paradise. Internet is an ocean of web and retrieving a specific piece of information needs specialized searching techniques. Search engines, including Meta search engines and directories are the only tools to explore the web, even though the amount of invisible data (invisible web) is much higher than the indexed data. After inception search engines are doing a commendable job to minimize indivisible web.

Brief history of search engines

United States Department of Defense, in the year 1957 created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to enhance the U S supremacy in the area of military with the use of science and technology. They established ARPANET for sharing information with networking technology in 1969 under restricted environment and in 1972 ARPANET went on public domain which led the birth of the Internet. With advent of World Wide Web (WWW) a revolution in the field of information exchange over the Internet has been experienced. Many people get confused on the meaning of the Internet and WWW.

Internet: Internet is the network of the networks where we can talk about machine (computer) and cables (nodes).

WWW: It is the content part on which one can found information in the form of documents, sound, video etc. and it always exist on the Network because www is the programme which communicates between computers connected over the net.

Once Information being started sharing globally by the people, it becomes important to retrieve the same in systematic form. Therefore, Search Engines came into the picture. Search engines works through following three major steps:

Spiders of search engines follow links on the web to request pages that are either not yet indexed or have been updated since they were last indexed.

With help of a crawler, these pages added in the index of the search engines. So while searching, users are not really searching the web but searching in the updated index of the search engines which provide the links to the main source.

User or search Interface (for users) is the 3^rd major part of a search engine.

Growth of search engines:

Archie, the first search engine was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage. It indexed computer files which was located at anonymous FTP for downloading. Just after that ‘Gopher’ search engine came to existence which indexed plain text documents

In stream first renowned search engine is World Wide Web Wanderer which was created by Matthew Gray in the year 1993. It is considered at first robot which ran monthly in the initial years to know the size of the web.

The first populated search engine was ‘Excite’ was created in the year 1993. It was the outcome of a project work of few Stanford University students and was released for general use in 1994.

In 1994, two students of Stanford University Jerry Yang and David Filo created Yahoo! by posting web pages with links to them. Their efforts were recognised all over and then they start listing of all their favorite web sites with description of the page and it become the first popular search engine directory to search the web. After receiving funds Yahoo become the prominent name in the search engines.

In the same year WebCrawler was introduced as first full-text search engine. It was again the outcome of a project work at University of Washington. Web public found this search engine as extensive tool to explore the web.

In 1994, Lycos appeared with various indexing facilities. For the year 1996, Lycos had indexed over 60 millions web pages and become largest search engine of that time.

Infoseek introduced in 1995 which was quite similar to Lycos. In the same year Alta Vista was launched. It was the first search engine which allows natural language to retrieve the information with advanced searching techniques. It also provides the searching facilities to multimedia documents, like audio, video, images etc.

Inktomi, in 1996, utilized ‘concept induction’ technology in which experience of human analysis applied to know which web site is mostly used and productive. Inktomi was purchased by Yahoo in 2003.

Ask Jeeves and Northern Light both were launched in 1997. After few months Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Stanford University launched ‘Google’ which started providing inbounds links to rank sites. Later MSN Search and Open Directory were also started. In the year 2004 GoodSearch and wikiseek and in 2006 Ask.com and Live Search came into existence.

Search engine business is quite competitive, therefore various other search engines like Kosmix and Hakia etc have started mushrooming with additional features apart from simple searching.

Institutional Repositories in India – an update

2009-04-30T23:07:00.016+05:30

Digital Repository @ INFLIBNET Centre

This is an update to our earlier post ‘Institutional Repositories in India’, of 28th December, 2008. In which we discussed about some of the important but active institutional repositories in India.

Information and Library Network Centre (INFLIBNET) is always been a front runner for the development of academic libraries in our country. From library automation to online subscription and from manpower development to open access, Centre has been exploring new domains of Information management and dissemination to facilitate the Indian academics. Under the able and dynamic leadership of Dr. Jagdish Arora, Centre has been achieving new heights day by day. His leadership has given new ways of consortium subscription, meaningful logo to the Centre, enveloping colleges and social science institutes in the national consortium stream, permanent building to the Centre and more, this list goes on and on by which Centre has been exploring various cooperative ventures at all levels. INFLIBNET’s website which was not accessible earlier for most of the time is now one of the lively and highly visited websites by the academic world. Whole credit goes to Dr. Arora and his team of scientists who have given new hopes to achieve 2020 vision of the nation in desired time by facilitating the nation with free flow of scholarly information.

In 2003 Centre created Institutional Repository with the name as 'Dspace @ INFLIBNET' but it remained inaccessible most of the time due to some technical reasons. Recently INFLIBNET has revamped and relaunched this institutional repository with more smooth and vibrant look. It is created on Dspace (An open source software) and can be accessed at http://ir.inflibnet.ac.in:8080/jspui/. The repository is providing access to INFLIBNET’s news through ‘INFLIBNET in Press and Media’ and also giving access to ‘INFLIBNET’s Convention Proceedings’ collection which is covering articles published in all conventions (CALIBER & PLANNER) of the Centre from the year 2003 onwards.

We do hope the National Information and Library Network Centre of the country will always keep the librarianship's flag high and lead the world by setting up best examples.

Thank you for your suggestions and comments

2009-04-28T23:59:00.005+05:30

Dear Professional Friends,

We would like to extend our sincere thanks for your personal as well as anonymous suggestions which you have sent to give a quality shape to this blog. We are trying to incorporate all your valued feedback and assure you for extending our serious as well as sincere efforts for the betterment of the 'key 2 information'. We aspire to have more suggestions and comments from you to give this web-space a more vibrant and informative shape. The professionals who wish to contribute by posting their articles, opinions and views on latest trends in library and information science on this blog are also welcomed. Please send your suggestions and comments at sureshbabal@gmail.com.

Hope to have quality discussion over professional issues.

With kind regards,

Sincerely yours,

Contributors

Latest Trends in Libraries – A Discussion (Part – I)

2009-04-24T22:46:00.027+05:30

Since very inception libraries have been known as knowledge centres and to enhance the best possible use of these libraries is always been a biggest concern of librarians. Although, librarians are known as vibrant techno–savvy group of professionals, who have been dealing with information management. Even though, emergence of Internet has placed various challenges infront of them and others. Internet has also changed the outlook of the libraries and put them on the way to achieve virtual library concept. However, librarians have already established harmonization with the professional’s objectives and the Internet by experimenting with state of the art technology to facilitate end users.

At present, Internet has become the most important ingredient of library service system. Apart from computerization and building digital libraries Internet has become a medium to convey meanings of libraries in practicalities. Here we would like to discuss few of the points which have been given birth to new streams of librarianship. Following are the few topics which we feel are being taken by the librarians prominently. Here, a brief introduction to these areas are being given and later all these will be discussed duly.

Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0: Libraries have always been the front runners to envelop web into their own system. Applications of the web 2.0 in libraries are known as library 2.0.

Web1.0 is linking of various simple web pages and accessed over very minute connectivity through radio link or other channels. In the beginning when libraries started developing their web pages used web1.0 but soon they had jumped into library2.0 to give better feel of library services.

Web2.0 brought better concept of sharing and two way interaction over the internet. In this users' perspective is prominently being taken careof. Blogs, wikis, social networking etc are the points to highlight.

Web3.0 is in visualization and a definition about web3.0 is yet to establish. This generation of Internet will full of artificial intelligence technologies. This would be possible with fully applicability of semantic web. In my opinion Web3.0 can be known as virtual library system.

Web4.0 generation accommodates limitless use of semantic web. Even the thought of web4.0 is not fully developed. Invisible web will not be there in this generation and most importantly, it will show the presence everywhere through various computer and communication technologies, like light computing etc.

Mashup Technology: In simple terms mapping of various contents from other resources at single interface is called Mashup Technology. Since various contents are available over the Internet in different formats, these scattered contents are posing a need to assemble them to give single representation. The objective of the Mashup Technology is quite similar to Portal Technology but Portal Technology is more standardized and framed as compare to Mashup Technology.

ERAMS: E-Resource Access and Management Services (ERAMS) is an important tool to analyse the use and workflows of electronic contents in electronic and digital libraries. After procuring and subscribing e-books and e-journals libraries need to evaluate their usage in the library. ERAMS support the librarians to analyse the usage and also helps for policy makers to plan properly about the subscription and optimum use of the e-resources.

Open Source and Open Access: For libraries both these terms go hand in hand. Open access is excellent idea to serve the society, whereas open sources are the tools giving dynamic ways of managing and executing the vision of open access.

Search Engines: Search engines are dominating the Internet world, presently we are observing a war of search engines over the Internet. Every search engine has its own specialities and qualities, we would try to evaluate most of the renowned search engines as user and will publish series of reports during short span of time.

Federated Search: Federated search is the simultaneous search of various online databases and resources. It is providing the base to search scattered online databases through single interface. Many online databases, portals and search engines are using federated search technique.

Dear friends, we soon will come out with the discussion on above quoted latest areas and various other important as well as informative topics related to our profession. I would like to thank all who have given their suggestions to improve the quality of this blog. If you have any suggestion or wishing to contribute on this blog, please contact at sureshbabal@gmail.com.

Does KOSMIX challenge the Google or Librarians?

2009-04-05T00:19:00.009+05:30

The web which is so deep that no one can peep inside to find out the most desired information for oneself. And the major issue for the information seeker is to grasp the ocean of information; so many search engines and meta- search engines are providing their services but still we never fill up to our fill. At present Google dominates the mind of Internet users. Whenever any query comes in our mind, naturally our fingers start typing the website-www.google.com, and in the mean time whole ocean came in front of us, and we keep on exploring page after page but never able to satisfy the thirst of precise information. I am not here to criticize Google or any other search engines, but want to express my views or experience with KOSMIX.COM. It attracts me so much that it makes me spend my whole day to explore it, to inform about its features. Few days ago, I was searching for video lectures on my research topic which deals with learning object, tried to explore with Google web and then Google videos but did not feel satisfied with result output, but when I put learning object in search window of KOSMIX, it provided with multi- dimensional search out put, images, videos, what is happening in news about the topic, related terms and their search output, same way to further explore discussions, communities and FAQ's about the topic. More or less it provides with information from broad to specific, multidimensional and multifaceted. Here, what I had been intending from my search query few days ago, it takes me very near to my expectations.

I have got to say that it has serious potential. Fine, now let me share few of the things about KOSMIX as its uses perspective.

Search at KOSMIX is a revolutionary way to explore the web, and its strength lays in its way to present the information in classified form. It is like a hybrid library that deals with so many formats and mediums to satisfy the needs of users beyond text- only- document under one window. This must be boon for the users who wish to see different medias and sources grouped, or who are interested in a variety of different angles and interpretation of the same subject, for this approach KOSMIX can be more useful.

KOSMIX is founded by two Indians Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinaryan who graduated from IIT Madras and PhD from the Stanford University who earlier founded one of the best shopping search engines called junglee. They called KOSMIX an ‘explore engine’ instead of a search engine. It is a new search engine, which is like one stop shopping for all your web and media needs. Broadly, it categorizes information in various heads viz. Reference; Media; News & Blogs; Shopping; Web search etc. Further, it divides the information of search query in to various fields like: At a Glance; Topic Highlight; Reference; Videos; Images; Conversations; News& blogs; Related topics; People & Community; Shopping; FAQ's and so on. The official slogan of this search engine is, "The web organized for you”. Through its official notes it does not placing any challenge to Google because it is helping users to search Google in more specific manner. It provides the multimedia view to your search. KOSMIX categorization engine organizes the Internet into magazine- style topic pages, enabling people to navigate the web even if they don't know exactly what they are looking for?

From the view of librarians, which are known for their techno-savvy attitude to adopt latest technologies, it presents the picture of a catalogued web. They have always set an example to use latest tools to manage and facilitate end user. The ocean of the WWW over the Internet has been remained one of the biggest challenges for the librarians. Information literacy and federated search minimize the barrier between a piece of information on the WWW and librarians but never addressed to the satisfactory level. Librarians are still eager to answer the question of how to make precise search on the web for a particular keyword? That KOSMIX is quietly answering.

Earlier yahoo has tried with its new search engine product named ‘yahoo glue’ which is offering aggregator search to contents of You Tube, Wikipedia, Flicker and many other news sources. Furthermore online version of Encyclopedia Britannica has also been started giving output of the query in groups of different formats like result from encyclopedia, audio video, dictionaries, thesaurus, websites, and images etc on a single window. Moving a step ahead KOSMIX is not only aggregating results but also taking precision value in account while fetching the data on the screen. Undoubtedly it has put a challenge to the librarians and information managers to think ahead of whatever KOSMIX is offering.

As it display the information fully classified and categorized by its features. As catalogue and thesaurus guides the users towards related information about the topic through its see and see also entries. This provides the analytical approach towards finding information. KOSMIX is a mash up service, more like a smart portal with Google results and half dozen or more other sources of information.

It is like an Encyclopedia of single search term. As it provides background information about the topic, a user who wants to explore a new topic and intends to write an article or overview of that subject, can easily find balanced information on the every aspect without feeling the overload of information. It allows the users to select how they want to consume the information.

Another feature of this site is that you can share your search results with other persons through email.

Just try to explore the potential of this new search engine!!!

Free access to scholarly literature

2009-04-02T13:41:00.010+05:30

Access to scholarly literature is one of the most important ingredient of knowledge driven economy. Electronic journals are the journals which are available on the Internet. Scholarly Electronic Journals had always been the jinx of commercialization and led to acceleration of price. Ever increasing cost of these journals deprived academicians and researchers of developing and under developed countries from the scholarly information.

Being a librarian, I can well understand the challenge of libraries to provide rich collection of scholarly literature with paucity of funds. One should keep oneself inform to grab the golden opportunities to enrich your knowledge banks with free and open access literature. I am feeling happy to inform you about this ocean of knowledge.

Look! What is SAGE offering to you?

The sage journals online is providing users with free access to one of the largest and most powerful collection of social science, humanities, science, technical and medical content in the world.

SAGE Publications is a leading international publishers of journals, books, and electronic media for academic, educational and professional markets. Since 1965, sage has been helping to inform and educate a global communitly of scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students spanning a wide range of subject areas including business, humanities, social science, and science, technology and medicine.

To grab this opportunity, register yourself for free online access to more than 500 Sage journals with content available from 1999- current untill April 30, 2009.So be with SAGE PUBLICATIONS now.

Click here https://online.sagepub.com/cgi/register?registration=FTApr2009-2

Institutional Repositories in India

2008-12-28T15:41:00.008+05:30

Nowadays, it is a trend of Institutional repositories all around. Many of the institutions have their repositories which they have built on various open source software. The saddest part of this is that various institutes had created these digital repositories for testing or trial purpose only and could not maintain the pace to streamline those. Many of them are closed and are not being updated regularly. DSpace at INFLIBNET, an institutional repository of the Centre, which is responsible for creating the vibration in the use of open software software for digital library, and for many other important issues, is also not able to host its own institutional repository on regular basis. Following is the list of institutional repositories from India which are currently active on the Internet.

Digital Repository of IIT Bomaby

Digital repository of IIT Bombay is a research produced at IITB. It presents a selection of our best research including full-text of book chapters, conference/proceeding papers, technical reports, journal pre-prints & post-prints, working papers, Patents and others like annual reports etc.

DRS@ino

It is a digital repository service of National Institute of Oceanography, India. DRS@nio tries to collect, preserve and disseminate different institutional publications (journal articles, conference proceeding articles, Technical reports, thesis, dissertations, etc). You can search, browse and access publications of NIO from this collection. In its collection 1491 documents are available.

DSpace@NITR

DSpace@NITR of National Institute of Technology, Rourkela collects, preserves and dissiminates the intellectual output of NITR to the global audience. Presently, it archives journal articles, pre-prints and conference papers authored by NITR researchers.

DSpace@MDI

Management Development Institute, Gurgaon has created its digital library on DSpace.

DSpace at Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode

IIMK’s institutional repository, a scholarly archiving facility for the IIMK community, using the DSpace software, Jointly developed by MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard Labs. This service enables the Institute community to archive their preprints, post prints and other scholarly publications. In keeping with the objectives of the Open Access movement, this service to facilitate the Institute researchers in self-archiving and long-term preservation of their scholarly publications, provide easy access to these publications world wide and improve impact of their research. While dspace@iimk can be accessed by anybody, submission of documents to this archive is limited to the IIMK research community. Currently 607 documents are there covering various subject areas.

DSpace at National Chemical Laboratory, Pune

National Chemical Laboratory, Pune has Open Access to its research and other scientific documents through the digital library built on DSpace software. The 357 documents of scientific nature are hosted on it.

DSpace@INFLIBNET (Accessible sometimes)

INFLIBNET Centre, Ahmedabad is maintaining an institutional repository on DSpace. This institutional repository contains the article published in the proceedings of the International and National conferences and seminars, organized by the Centre. It also includes news and other important material related to library and information science areas.

Digital Collections@INFLIBNET Centre

The UGC funded Major /Minor Research Project database contained full-text of the project report submitted to the University Grants Commission in Science, Humanities, Engineering & Technology, Medicine and Agriculture. This full-text database is maintained by INFLIBNET Centre and the copy of the project reports were received by INFLIBNET Centre from the project investigators in electronic form. The INFLIBNET Centre is happy to include in the UGC Funded Major /Minor Research Project database for the academic user community of this country. The Project database provides maximum options for retrieving the desired project report from the database. Efforts were made to provide maximum information about the project report in the first instance. Efforts were also made to provide maximum fields for searching from the database and included most important fields.

ePrints@SVNIT (Sardar Vallabhbai National Institute of Technology)

ePrints@SVNIT repository collects, preserves and disseminates in digital format the research output created by the SVNIT community.It enables the Institute community to deposit their preprints, postprints and other scholarly publications using a web interface, and organizes thesepublications for easy retrieval. While ePrints@SVNIT can be accessed by anybody, submission of documents to this repository is limited to the SVNIT community. ePrints@SVNIT repository is running on EPrints open archive software, a freely distributable archive system available from eprints.org.

eGyanKosh (It needs registration)

eGyanKosh- a National Digital Repository to store, index, preserve, distribute and share the digital learning resources developed by the Open and Distance Learning Institutions in the country. Items in eGyanKosh are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved by IGNOU, unless otherwise indicated. To access the items in repository registration is required. Registration is free. Currently it is containing around 30,000 documents.

ePrints@IIT Delhi

Digital repository of Indian Institute of Technology Delhi research and Electronic Submission of Theses and Dissertations [ETD]. It contains around 2200 documents.

ePrints@IISc

This is the open access repository of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. Prints@IISc repository collects, preserves and disseminates in digital format the research output created by the IISc research community. It enables the Institute community to deposit their preprints, postprints and other scholarly publications using a web interface, and organizes these publications for easy retrieval. While eprints@IISc can be accessed by anybody, submission of documents to this repository is limited to the IISc research community only. Number of publications in the repository is 12010 and still growing.

ePrints@Catalysis

ePrints@Catalysis repository collects, preserves and disseminates in digital format the research output created by the National Centre for Catalysis Research (NCCR) and also other catalysis research publications from India on behalf of the Catalysis Society of India (CSI). It enables the Catalysis community to deposit their preprints, postprints and other scholarly publications using a web interface, and organizes these publications for easy retrieval. While eprints@Catalysis can be accessed by anybody, submission of documents to this repository is limited to the catalysis research community of NCCR and India.

ePrings@SBTMKU

School of Biotechnology, Madurai Kamraj University, Madurai

Indian Institute of Astrophysics Repository

This is the digital repository of publications of Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore, India, developed to capture, disseminate and preserve research publications of IIAP. You can search, browse and access full text of these publications from the repository. This Repository also hosts papers published in Bulletin of the Astronomical Society of India. This repository is created to accommodate all publications of the institute. Which include the archival contents which are out of copyright in the repository for better access. Most of these contents are catalogued, classified, digitized and uploaded in the Open Access Repository with appropriate metadata. For those contents which are protected by copyright only metadata is provided. Researchers can request the Indian Institute of Astrophysics Archives for full-text of these contents. It is a collection of 3955 documents and being updated regularly.

Institutional Repository of National Aerospace Laboratories

NAL's Institutional Repository is the digital archive of the research output of NAL’s scientists. This knowledge base covers journal articles, conference papers, technical reports, presentation/lectures, preprints, Thesis, images etc. One can browse the documents by author, division, subject, date and document type. Both simple and advanced search facilities have been provided. Number of items in the Repository are 2866.

Kautilya Digital Repository of IGIDR

Digital repository of conference proceedings, thesis and dissertations and research articles, etc hosted at Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai, India. It contains around 200 publications of the institute.

NISCAIR Online Periodicals Repository

You can now access full text articles from research journals published by NISCAIR! Presently full text facility is provided for two of the journals viz. IJBB & IJC-A. For other journals, you can access abstracts. Full text of these journals will be made available in due course of time. The Collection of this repository is 2265 documents.

OpenMED@NIC

It is an open access archive for Medical and Allied Sciences. The aim of OpenMED@NIC is to provide free service to academics, researchers, and students working in the area of Medical and Allied Sciences. Here authors / owners can self-archive their scientific and technical documents. For this they need to register once in order to obtain a user id in OpenMED@NIC system. However no registration is required for searching the archive or viewing the documents. OpenMED@NIC is a discipline based International Archive. It peer-reviewed documents having relevance to research in Medical and Allied Sciences including Bio-Medical, Medical Informatics, Dental, Nursing and Pharmaceutical Sciences. These could be peer-reviewed preprints, postprints (refereed journal paper) and accepted theses. In case of non-English documents, descriptive data [Author, Title, Source etc.], abstract and keywords must be in English. Submitted documents will be placed into the submission buffer and would become part of OpenMED@NIC archive on their acceptance.

NISCAIR Online Periodicals Repository

One can access full text articles from research journals published by NISCAIR! Presently full text facility is provided for two of the journals viz. IJBB & IJC-A. For other journals abstracts can be accessed. Full text of these journals will be made available in due course of time.

RRI Digital Repository (Raman Research Institute Digital Repository)

This contains the research publications of the faculty and students of the Raman Research Institute. The collected papers of C.V. Raman and the historical records of the institute (Annual Reports and Newspaper Clippings) are also housed here. 3624 documents are there in its collection.

Open Access – Part IV (Electronic Theses and Dissertations)

2008-12-09T20:54:00.007+05:30

Universities are highly responsible for developing new theories through innovative research studies in all around the globe. Students and scholars are putting their best efforts to produce new facts and principles in these centres of higher studies. In India we have around 350 universities and every year almost 12000 PhDs are being produced by these universities. Avoiding duplication of research work is a serious matter of concern to all nations.

Innovations in ICTs become a boon to avoid duplication as well as utilization of these studies. An electronic submission of these dissertations and theses are known as ETDs. ETDs giving possibilities to incorporate new technologies and multimedia contents for conveying research outputs in more attractive and interesting way. ETDs are playing a major role in avoiding duplication and also forcing extensive utilization of these resources. I am recollecting an incident occurred couple of years ago in a department of a university (deliberately hiding the name) where two scholars were worked on same topic for around a full year. The university authority came to know about the duplication of this topic when it was discussed in a council meeting for registration. This happened in a department where two scholars and their guides worked on the same topic for a year of so. It happened in a same session, in the same department. Now one can imagine the state of duplication in the inter universities research studies. Though, Information and Library Network Centre (INFLIBNET) in India has been putting best of its efforts to provide updated listing of PhD theses with the help of UGC’s declarations note of every individual theses which they have started receiving few years back only. The Centre is also trying hard to give national guidelines for ETDs to the Government. ‘Vidyanidhi’ project is an excellent example of ETDs in India. Still implementation of ETDs at national level is cut throat need of the hour.

Words in against of ETDs:

Many of the universities are not in favour of providing their research outputs (Dissertations and Theses) on public domain. Even few universities do not have listing of research works on their websites and any other form.

Words In favour of ETDs:

On these research works national money has been involved (salaries of a guide and subscription of information resource being paid by Government i.e. UGC, AICTE or other national agencies which is public money). Therefore, outcome of these universities must be available to all citizens of the country free of cost. Sharing of these resources would encourage the more productive and quality research works.

Following is the listing of few databases on ETDs available on public domain via the Internet. Many of these databases from this list provide fulltext and few covers abstracts and bibliographical information.

Africa South of the Sahara: Topics: Dissertations and Theses on Africa

An extensive list of Internet sources for obtaining dissertations and theses on Africa-related topics.

American Historical Association: Directory of History Dissertations

A searchable directory of history dissertations that have been completed or that are currently in progress in the United States and Canada since 1882. This directory is the merger of two previous online publications, Dissertations in Progress and the Directory of Completed Dissertations.

American Indian in Graduate Studies Database

Includes all theses and dissertations containing at least one chapter on American Indians accepted between 1890 and 2002 by institutions located in the United States and Canada as well as selected Mexican research universities.

Australian Digital Theses Progarm

A national collaborative distributed database of digitised theses and dissertations produced by the postgraduate research students at Australian universities. Also includes some New Zealand theses. The ADT program is designed to improve access to, and enhance transfer of, the research information contained in theses by providing a full text version available from the desktop via the web. The retrieval is enhanced by the inclusion of metadata tags in the documents which are given a higher weighting by the more sophisticated search engines.

British Library Thesis Service

Information on locating and obtaining British theses dating mainly from 1970 to the present.

Caltech ETD database

http://etd.caltech.edu/

The Caltech ETD database is a series of web pages and perl scripts that interact with a MySQL database. These scripts provide a standard interface for web users and researchers. ETD authors, graduate school and library personnel to enter and manage the files and metadata related to a collection of electronic theses and dissertations.

CRL Catalog (Center for Research Libraries)

CRL holds an extensive collection of dissertations from outside the U.S. and Canada, and will order titles not held if requested by Rutgers or any other member institution. The Dissertations subset of the catalog can be searched separately.

CityU Theses Online

CityU Theses Online (CityUTO) provides online access to the abstracts and tables of contents of CityU research postgraduate theses and taught postgraduate dissertations available in the Library, dating back to 1990. The full text of all research postgraduate theses and some taught postgraduate dissertations is also available online to CityU staff and students.

Dissertations & Theses Collection (DTC)

Dissertations and Theses Collections (DTC) is an online union collection of Hong Kong postgraduate students’ doctoral and master dissertations and theses indexed in the online catalogues of seven university libraries in Hong Kong.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations in the Humanities: a directory of online references and resources

This site serves as a clearing-house for online information related to electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) in the humanities. The site's most important feature is a directory of most (maybe not quite all) of the ETDs that are currently in progress in the various disciplines that comprise the academic humanities. Among its other uses, I hope the material available here will be of aid to graduate students who are faced with securing approval and support for an ETD of their own. Audiences also include faculty who want to make informed decisions about supervising an ETD, as well as librarians, administrators, and academic publishers.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations available at NCSU Libraries

Since 1997, students have been able to submit an electronic version of their thesis or dissertation. On April 22, 2002, electronic submission became required. Electronic NC State theses and dissertations are accessible in the catalog as well as from this page.

E-thesis – electronic publications at the University of Helsinki

This site contains doctoral dissertations and other publications from the University of Helsinki. All of these full-text publications are freely accessible via the Internet.

ETDs at Brigham Young University

An ETD (Electronic Thesis or Dissertation) is a digital document suitable for machine archives and worldwide access. It may incorporate such features as enhanced graphics, sound, and animation. In addition, ETDs enable users to perform comprehensive searches using words, phrases, or symbols. Graduate Studies and the Harold B. Lee Library make all ETDs easily available over the WWW.

etd@IISc (etd AT Indian Institute of Science)

This is the digital repository of Theses and Dissertations of Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. You can search, browse and access theses and dissertations from this collection. This repository has been developed to capture, disseminate and preserve research theses of Indian Institute of Science. It complements ePrints @ IISc, the research publications repository of IISc. Total number of theses in etd@IISc: 327 in the month of November, 2008.

etds@vt

Search the title pages and abstracts of Electronic Theses and Dissertations that have been approved by the Virginia Tech Graduate School since 1995.

General Business Resources: Dissertations and Theses

RU Libraries Business Subject Research Guide.

Links to sources for dissertation lists related to business and to organizations that offer awards, grants, and prizes for Doctoral proposals and dissertations in business-related areas.

INFLIBNET - Union database of Theses

Theses database covers the bibliographic Metadata of Doctoral Theses submitted to 238 Universities/Institutes in India. It has over 2,19,074 unique records from all subject areas. This Data is contributed by participating Universities and we have collected more data from various reliable sources, university announcements etc. The database contains information pertaining to name of the researcher, title of the thesis, name of the guide, university name and year of award. The records are regularly being updated from different sources.

New Jersey Environmental Digital Library (NJEDL)

A searchable collection of environmental information from New Jersey's government agencies; research institutes; academic departments; and non-profit and non-governmental organizations. Includes information on Master's theses, Doctoral dissertations, and Undergraduate Honors theses.

NDLTD

The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) is an international organization dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination and preservation of electronic analogues to the traditional paper-based theses and dissertations. This website contains information about the initiative, how to set up Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) programmes, how to create and locate ETDs, and current research in digital libraries related to NDLTD and ETDs.

OAIster

Searchable collection of freely available, previously difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources including electronic dissertations and theses.

OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center

The ETD Center is a free, online database of Ohio’s masters and doctoral theses and dissertations from participating OhioLINK member schools. It contains the abstract for all included theses and dissertations. The full-text is also available if it was submitted. The ETD Center is freely accessible worldwide to anyone interested in searching, viewing, and downloading the theses and dissertations published in Ohio. Using a standard Web browser, users can search the database using basic keyword searching. Authors, university affiliation, and abstracts are all indexed.

OpenDOAR: Directory of Open Access Repositories

A searchable list of repositories that archive electronic dissertations and theses.

Österreichische Dissertationsdatenbank

A searchable database of Austrian dissertations; some full-text.

PhdData: the Universal Index of Doctoral Dissertations in Progress

An open academic community effort providing a searchable database of Doctoral dissertations in progress around the world. This site holds a database of doctoral dissertations in progress around the world. The site is an open academic community effort to avoid duplications in doctoral dissertations and Create the ultimate meeting place for researchers.

Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR): E-Theses

A registry of freely accessible electronic archives for theses and dissertations. Archives are listed alphabetically with additional access by country.

The Electronic theses and dissertations system

National Central Library (NCL) is the national depository library of theses and dissertations. Ever since the Ministry of Education entrusted the NCL of this responsibility, the NCL has proceeded to put together original paper versions of theses and dissertations as well as preserve them and enable their access to our public readers. The NCL further developed theses and dissertations abstracts database, established online information file system, fulltext database, etc. in order to promote an integrated portal service of theses online information.

The Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

The Graduate School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill began to accept dissertations and theses electronically for graduation in the spring of 2006. Paper and electronic submissions will both be accepted through November 2007. For those graduating in May 2008, electronic submission is required and only electronic documents will be accepted.

The University of Tennesse - Electronic Theses and Dissertations

UT thesis and dissertation

Theses Canada

A searchable central access point for Canadian theses. Coverage begins with 1965.

University of Florida (UF Theses and Dissertations)

Find records of UF Ph.D Dissertations and Master's Theses in the UF Library Catalog-- both print and online (ETD's -- Electronic Theses and Dissertations)

University of Kentucky Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The University of Kentucky offers all students submitting a thesis or dissertation the option of completing an electronic document (an ETD) instead of the traditional bound paper volume. The ETD satisfies all requirements of the Graduate School.

UNESCO Clearing House on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

Electronic thesis and dissertation policy clearinghouse from UNESCO, featuring database of institutions, experts, and materials supporting and disseminating ETDs.

Vidyanidhi Digital Library, University of Mysore Indian ETD Collection

Vidyanidhi (Meaning 'Treasure of Knowledge' in Sanskrit) is India's premier Digital library initiative to facilitate the creation, archiving and accessing of doctoral theses. Vidyanidhi is an information infrastructure, a digital library, a portal of resources, tools and facilities for doctoral research in India. Vidyanidhi is envisioned to evolve as a national repository and a consortium for e-theses through participation and partnership with universities, academic institutions and other stake holders. Vidyanidhi enhances access to Indian theses and enlarges the reach and audience for Indian doctoral research works.

Washington State University Research Exchange

The WSU Research Exchange is a digital repository; a system to store digital information and its descriptive metadata.

West Virginia University Electronic Theses and Dissertations

West Virginia University has implemented a policy that all master's theses and doctoral dissertations are to be submitted electronically. This means that WVU no longer will accept paper copies of theses and dissertations. Electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) contribute to worldwide graduate education and unlock the under utilized results of graduate education for the scholarly community. The Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Initiative at WVU has several purposes, including helping students in their careers, helping other learners and researchers, and making available many scholarly works that are now inaccessible, such as theses that are only available through inter library loan.

Worldwide ETD Search

A global index of freely available electronic theses and dissertations, provided by major ETD collections around the world.

Open Access – Part III (Library and Information Science E-Journals)

2008-12-02T23:49:00.010+05:30

Since couple of years, I was thinking to compile a list of electronic resources in general and journals/magazines in particular, available free of cost on open access mode via Internet. According to me, librarianship is a profession where one has to keep their eyes and ears open to keep up to date himself/herself with the latest development in their respective interest areas. Innovation of technology is changing ways of floating ideas in view of global perspectives of its usage. Web 2.0 application in the libraries has provoked and pondered upon new and new areas of librarianship.

Following is the list of few e-Journals/Magazines openly available on the Internet. The list grows up and new links will be added in due course of time.

Against the Grain

ATG is published on paper six times a year, in February, April, June, September, and November and December/January. It prominently gives news about libraries, publishers, book jobbers, and subscription agents.

ALA | TER: Technology Electronic Reviews

Technology Electronic Reviews (ISSN: 1533-9165) is a periodical copyright 1995-2007 by the American Library Association. It provides reviews of and pointers to resources, both print and electronic. Resources include books, articles, serials, discussion lists, software, training materials, and bibliographies.

ALA TechSource

Provides Library Technology Reports, Smart Libraries Newsletter, and the ALA TechSource Weblog.

ALCTS Network News

An electronic publication of the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services.

American Libraries

Covers general library science issues.

Annual Review of Information Science and Technology

The annual publication of the American Society for Information Science. Focuses on activities and trends in the field of information science and technology. Includes links to the ASIS home page and print version purchase information.

Ariadne

Quarterly publication aimed at academic librarians in the United Kingdom. Links to back issues from 1996.

Associates: the electronic library support staff journal

This journal is a forum for and about library support staff issues. It is published three times per year in March, July, and November. Subscription is FREE

Biblia's Warrior Librarian Weekly

Pokes fun at the people who use libraries and the funnier ones who work in them.

Business and Finance Division Bulletin

Bulletin of the Business and Finance Division of The Special Libraries Association (SLA). Complete issues available for 2002. Selected articles available 2003+.

Cataloging & Classification Quarterly

Editorial information, tables of contents and abstracts.

Chinese Librarianship: an International Electronic Journal

A peer reviewed e-journal with an international outlook focusing on the practical aspect of Chinese librarianship.

Christian Library Journal

Reviews of books, videos, cassette tapes, and CDs from a Christian point of view.

Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large

Walt Crawford's commentary and annotated citations of selected articles on library and computer related issues.

College and Research Libraries

This prestigious scholarly journal from the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) is available online from 1997, volume 58-January, 2007, volume 68.

Communications in Information Literacy

An open access refereed journal. It covers knowledge, theory and research in information literacy.

Computers in Libraries

Online version of the monthly magazine focusing on library oriented information technology.

Cultivate Interactive

E-journal which is funded by the European Commission to disseminate information on digital cultural heritage including projects funded by the EU's DIGICULT programme.

Cybermetrics Electronic journal of scientometrics, informetrics and bibliometrics

An electronic journal devoted to the description and analysis of the internet as scholarly communication tool.

D-Lib Magazine

Monthly publication about research and innovation in digital libraries.

DLIST:Digital Library of Information Science and Technology

DLIST, Digital Library of Information Science and Technology is a cross-institutional, subject-based, open access digital archive for the Information Sciences, including Archives and Records Management, Library and Information Science, Information Systems, Museum Informatics, and other critical information infrastructures.

EJASL: The Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship

Independent, professional, refereed journal dedicated to advancing knowledge and research in the areas of academic and special librarianship.

ELIS

Open access archive of preprints, post prints and other documents in the field of library and information science.

Evidence Based Library and Information Practice

This new publication from University of Alberta Learning Services is an open access, peer reviewed journal that provides articles and reviews on evidence based library and information practice.

Ex Libris

An e-zine for librarians and information junkies.

First Monday

Peer-reviewed journal about the Internet and the Global Information Infrastructure.

FOCUS on the Center for Research Libraries

The quarterly newsletter for the CRL, includes news of the Center's programs, policies, new acquisitions, staff, and more. Issues from May-June 1998 are available here.

High Energy Physics Libraries Webzine

Issues relevant to high energy physics libraries from the point of view of both information workers and library clients.

IFLA Journal

Journal of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, an international organization focusing on libraries and library users. Contains tables of contents, abstracts and some full text beginning with 1993.

Info To Go

Sample issue and information about the monthly print publication aimed at information professionals. Dedicated to eliminating aimless surfing.

Information for Social Change

Publication of the organization, Information for Social Change, which focuses on "issues of censorship, freedom and ethics amongst library and information workers."

Information Processing and Management

Bimonthly peer reviewed print journal published by Elsevier Science.

Information Research: an international electronic journal

Presents research papers and working papers from a variety of information related disciplines, including information science, information management, information systems, information policy and librarianship.

Information Research: an international electronic journal

This is an excellent research journal, published by the Dept. of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield.

Information Retrieval

Subscription ejournal dedicated to theory and experimentation in information retrieval. Sample copy available.

Information Technology & Libraries

Articles on information technology specific to the library field.

Information Today

Product information and news for librarians.

Informing Science: International Journal of an Emerging Discipline

Information systems, library science and journalism evolve to form a new discipline. Quarterly journal available in print or online.

Inter-Actions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies

Inaugurated in 2004, this journal aims to provide an outlet for emerging scholars in the fields of education and information studies.

International Journal of Computer and Information Science and Engineering (IJCISE)

International Journal of Computer and Information Science and Engineering (IJCISE) is a scholarly open access, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary, quarterly and fully refereed journal focusing on theories, methods and applications in Computer and Information Science and Engineering.

International Information and Library Review

Progress and research in international and comparative librarianship, documentation, and information retrieval. Published quarterly by Academic Press.

International Journal of Information Management

Aimed at "managers charged with the responsibility of designing and managing complex information systems." From Elsevier Science

International Journal on Digital Libraries

Quarterly print journal emphasizing digital information and libraries. Register for email notification of contents.

Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship

Electronic journal from the Science and Technology Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries.

Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship

Home page for Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, an electronic journal from the Science and Technology Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries.

Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship

A quarterly from the Science and Technology Section, ACRL. Indexed in Library Literature and INSPEC.

Journal of Academic Librarianship

Covers all aspects of librarianship specific to academic libraries.

Journal of Digital Contents (JDC)

International quarterly journal about the management, presentation and uses of contents in digital environments.

Journal of Digital Information

A peer reviewed ejournal focusing on information in digital environments. Supported by the British Computer Society and Oxford University Press.

Journal of Electronic Publishing

Articles with archives about electronic publishing.

Journal of Information Law and Technology

Published by the Universities of Warwick and Strathclyde in the United Kingdom.

Katharine Sharp Review

A peer-reviewed e-journal devoted to student scholarship and research in library and information science.

Law Library Journal

Official journal of the American Association of Law Libraries. Includes subscription information and links to selected articles from 2000 to the present.

Libraries and Culture

A print based journal that explores the significance of libraries; their creation, organization and preservation in the context of cultural and social history.

Library and Information Update

Monthly magazine of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals. Includes selected articles from past issues.

Library Issues

Highlights key issues in academic librarianship. Its intended audience is faculty and academic administrators and librarians who work with them. LI's short articles present the various facets of controversial topics, not campus-specific solutions.

Library Journal Digital

Library Journal's online edition. Features current news about libraries and librarians. Includes job opportunities.

Library Juice

Rory Litwin's long running library news digest. Includes announcements, web resources, calls for papers, and news affecting the library world. Archives available; no new issues will be published.

Library Philosophy and Practice

Peer reviewed online journal specializing in applied library science research. Articles available for downloading in PDF form. Links to guidelines for submission.

Library Quarterly

Prestigious print journal of scholarly research from The University of Chicago Press. Subscription information, submission guidelines, tables of contents from 1996 to the present and general information.

Library Resources & Technical Services

Features library issues related to resources management and technical services.

Library Student Journal

An open access journal of peer reviewed articles as well as essays, opinions and reviews by Information and Library Science students world wide.

LIBRES

Devoted to new research in library and information science.

LIBRES: Library and Information Science Research Journal

International, peer reviewed, online journal devoted to new research in Library and Information Science.

LIBRI: International Journal of Libraries and Information Services

Publishes original articles on all aspects of libraries and information services.

LISNews

Blake Carver's online Library and Information Science News Digest. Apropos articles culled from a variety of sources. Links, polls, submission guidelines and email updates.

Marginal Librarian

Ezine features articles and opinions from the McGill Library and Information Studies Student Association. Includes links to past issues.

MC Journal: The Journal of Academic Media Librarianship

A peer-reviewed online journal for practical and scholarly information concerning academic media librarianship.

Mississippi Libraries

Official publication of the Mississippi Library Association. Links to full text from 2000 to the present.

MLA Forum

Online journal of the Michigan Library Association. Includes articles and book reviews.

MLS: Marketing Library Services

A marketing information geared specifically towards librarians. Lists subscription information and contents of previous issues.

New Review of Information and Library Research

Annual print review designed for information professionals pertaining to the impact of contemporary information research on information and library services. Subscription information, submission guidelines and current tables of contents.

OCLC Newsletter

Issued by OCLC on news, research, products information related to the library and information science.

Online

Online is a monthly journal providing articles, product reviews, case studies, and evaluations about selecting, using, and managing electronic resources. The electronic version provides selected full-text articles and news from each issue.

PlugIn Datamation

Information technology news and features with daily updates.

Portal: Libraries and the Academy

Research journal covering technology, publishing, and periodicals.

Progressive Librarian

Semi annual print journal of the Progressive Librarians Guild. A forum for critical perspectives in Librarianship, featuring articles, book reviews, bibliographies, reports and documents that explore progressive perspectives on librarianship and information issues. Information on Guild membership, submission guidelines, tables of contents and the cover of the current issue.

Progressive Librarian

Published twice a year by the Progressive Librarians Guild. Indexing only is provided free at this site; full-text requires paid subscription.

Review of Information Science (RIS)

Reviews of latest published information.

School Library Journal Online

Online version of the print publication. Features current news about school libraries and librarians. Includes job opportunities.

Searcher: The Magazine for Database Professionals

Print based journal with 10 issues annually. Tables of contents and some full text available online along with subscription and submission information.

simile: Studies in media and information literacy education

A peer reviewed online journal from University of Toronto Press. Features scholarly articles pertaining to bibliographic instruction and information and media literacy.

Special Libraries

Special Libraries, the journal produced by the Special Library Association (SLA) from 1910-1996, is available in pdf format.

Teacher Librarian: The Journal for School Library Professionals

Offers access to selected past articles, reviews of books and software for resource centers, as well as links to online resources.

The Journal of Academic Media Librarianship

This journal contains updated information on librarianship and its role in media.

The Library Quarterly

Published four times a year, the Library Quarterly deals with library and information science issues, and reviews selected publications, covering research in all areas of librarianship. Abstracts available online from 1992 onwards.

The Public Access Computer Systems Review

Online journal about end user computer systems in libraries from University of Houston Libraries. Full text available from 1990 to present. Includes author/ subject index and submission guidelines.

The Unabashed Librarian

A print newsletter featuring advice, reports from the field, and do it yourself projects. Current table of contents, submission guidelines and subscription information.

The Wired Librarian's Newsletter

Advice on the implementation of microcomputers in libraries. In publication since 1983.

Transactions on Information Systems

The official publication of the Association for Computing Machinery. Available online or in print. Includes links to an digital library and subscription information.

World Libraries

An online international journal focusing on libraries and socio economic development.

Webology

Webology is an international peer-reviewed journal in English devoted to the field of the World Wide Web and serves as a forum for discussion and experimentation.

Library Research

EBSCO has made their Library, Information Science and Technology Abstracts database free for searching and provide key database content free of charge, as a service to its users and libraries, worldwide. We encourage users to go to the library to get access to additional EBSCOhost databases that maybe available, whether it be via their public library.

Open Access – Part II (Other Resources)

2008-11-25T00:13:00.018+05:30

In the last article ‘Open Access – Part I (Electronic Journals), we had discussed about the availability of scholarly journals via the Internet on public domain. In this chapter we‘ll discuss the other information databases (bibliographic as well as full text) accessible freely. All these databases work like portals and detail about the source of information can be retrieved. Following is the list of commonly used databases. This article includes Information Gateways, Portals and other important resources of information.

arXiv e-Prints

arXiv e-Prints Includes e-Print "preprints" in physics, mathematics, nonlinear sciences, and computer sciences. From Cornell University with assistance from the National Science Foundation (USA), the National Institute for Theoretical Physics (USA) and the University of Adelaide (Australia). Formats include PDF, PostScript, and DVI.

Caltech Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Searchable and browsable repository of theses and dissertations from Caltech.

ASCE CE Database

1970-present; indexes all of the American Society of Civil Engineers journals, conference proceedings, books, standards, manuals, magazines, and newsletters. Full text is available from 30 civil engineering journals.

Bubl Information Services

BUBL is a UK-based interactive information service which provides links to over 12,000 internet resources in a wide range of subject areas. Initially designed as a resource for librarians, it includes a directory of UK organisations and institutions, job postings, user group links, surveys and comprehensive archives. BUBL provides links to current editions of all major UK newspapers, as well as abstracts and selected full text from over 200 journals.

CCSD: Hyper Article Online

An interface for submitting scientific papers to the article database of the French Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe. Papers in mathematics, physics, information science are instantly and automatically directed to "arXiv". The free online access to these documents provided by HAL is intended to promote the best possible dissemination of research work; the intellectual property remains that of thpee author(s). Contributors must abide by the rules of good usage prevailing in scientific publications - respect and citation of original work, no intellectual plunder, etc.

CCSD: Thèses-en-Ligne
Eprint repository of French theses in various scientific domains [French/English].

CERN Document Server

Articles and preprints collection aiming to cover the published and pre-published literature in particle physics and its related technologies. The collection includes about 400,000 documents, many of which in full-text access.

Chemistry Central

Chemistry Central is a new service publishing peer-reviewed open access research in chemistry, from BioMed Central - the leading biomedical open access publisher. This site features chemistry-related articles published in Chemistry Central Journal, BioMed Central and independent journals utilizing BioMed Central's open access publishing services. All original research articles published by, or in cooperation with, Chemistry Central are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication.

CiteSeer
CiteSeer is a scientific literature digital library and search engine that focuses primarily on the literature in computer and information science. CiteSeer aims to improve the dissemination and feedback of the scientific literature and to provide improvements in functionality, usability, availability, cost, comprehensiveness, efficiency, and timeliness in the access of scientific and scholarly knowledge. Autonomously creates citation indexes of scientific literature. Generates citation statistics and allows easy browsing of the context of citations. Texts freely available in PDF, PS, HTML format.

Cogprints

Cogprints is an electronic archive for self-archive papers in any area of Psychology, neuroscience, and Linguistics, and many areas of Computer Science, Philosophy, Biology, Medicine, Anthropology, as well as any other portions of the physical, social and mathematical sciences that are pertinent to the study of cognition. Makes preprints and reprints of papers in all areas of the cognitive sciences freely available on-line. Authors can deposit their work in the archive after a (free) registration.

Collection on Critical Global Issues

The Collection on Critical Global Issues 2.0 was developed in 1999 by United Nations University Press. It contains 210 publications (32,000 pages) in the fields of Agriculture and Land Management, Development, Environment and Sustainability, Food and Nutrition, Natural Resource Development, Science and Technology. Full-text access to publications in the fields of agriculture and land management, development, environment and sustainability, food and nutrition, natural resource development, science and technology.

Computer Science Teaching Center

A digital archive of peer reviewed resources for teaching computer science. Submission restricted to registered users.

Digital Library and Archives - Virginia Tech

Open Archive Initiative (OAI) compliant digital repository. E-journals, electronic theses and dissertations, faculty archives.

Digital Library of Information Science and Technology

in 2002, DLIST, Digital Library of Information Science and Technology is a cross-institutional, subject-based, open access digital archive for the Information Sciences, including Archives and Records Management, Library and Information Science, Information Systems, Museum Informatics, and other critical information infrastructures. The dLIST vision is to serve as a dynamic archive in the Information Sciences, broadly understood, and positively impact and shape scholarly communication in our closely related fields.

DMOZ : Open Directory Project

The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.

Documents in Information Science

(DoIS) - Database of articles and conference proceedings published in electronic format in the field of library and Information science. At the moment we hold about 15183 articles and 4500 conference proceedings, 14070 of them are downloable from our site.

Electronic Publications of the WU-Wien

Electronic archive providing full-text access to working papers and dissertations of the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration.

EPrints in Library and Information Science

E-LIS is an open access archive to deposit preprints, postprints and other documents in the field of library and information science in electronic format. E-LIS was formed in 2003 for the deposit of documents in the Library and Information Science (LIS) domain. It is the first international e-server in this subject area and resulted from the RCLIS (Research in Computing, Library and Information Science) project and the DoIS (Documents in Information Science). E-LIS aims to further the Open Access philosophy by making available papers in LIS and related fields. It is a free-access international archive, in line with the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) movement and the Eprints movement, based on the Open Archive Initiative (OAI) standards and protocols.

ERIC (Education Resources Information Centre)

ERIC provides unlimited access to more than 1.2 million bibliographic records of journal articles and other education-related materials, with hundreds of new records added twice weekly. If available, links to full text are included.

eScholarship Repository

Repository of the University of California, U.S., offering a broad range of e-books, journals and peer-reviewed scientific documents. The repository is a service of the scholarship initiative of the California Digital Library. Research and scholarly output included here has been selected and deposited by the individual University of California units.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.

History and Theory of Psychology Prints

(HTP) Gives access to full-text of refereed papers. Registered users may also deposit appropriate material. It is offered as a free service to the community of scholarly historians and theoreticians of psychology with the goal of promoting the rapid dissemination of new work in the field.

HofPrints
An electronic archive for papers produced by members of the Hofstra University Community. It includes papers written by faculty and administrators, papers delivered at Hofstra University sponsored conferences as well as invited lectures.

IngentaConnect

IngentaConnect offers one of the most comprehensive collections of academic and professional research articles online - some 20 million articles from 30,000 publications, including 10,000 online. A comprehensive collection of citation data - some 20 million articles from 30,000 publications.

IOWA University - Computer Science Technical Reports

Digital repository of full-text technical reports downloadable in multiple formats.

MathGuide

The MathGuide is an Internet-based subject gateway to scholarly relevant information in mathematics, located at the Lower Saxony State- and University Library, Göttingen (Germany). Resources are described and evaluated with a set of Dublin Core metadata. MathGuide was developed as part of the special subject area project SSG-FI.

Medical and Health Library

The Medical and Health Library 1.0 was built in December 1999. It is jointly initiated by the Humanity Libraries Project (now called Human Info NGO), and the Payson Center for International Development of Tulane University. It contains 210 publications - 30,000 pages of ideas and solutions - in the fields of Clinical Treatment, Emergencies, Essential Drugs, Family Planning, Food and Nutrition, Health Education, HIV/AIDS, Medical Equipment, Prevention, Public Health, Research, Sanitaiton.

MIT Theses: Science, Technology, and Society

Searchable collection of selected MIT master's and doctoral theses available online.

NASA Astrophysic Data System

Free online abstracts and full-text papers in astronomy, astrophysics, planetary sciences, and solar physics. The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is a Digital Library portal for researchers in Astronomy and Physics, operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) under a NASA grant. The ADS maintains three bibliographic databases containing more than 7.3 million records: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Physics, and arXiv e-prints.

OAIster
Gives access to a large number of eprints archives and electronic resources and through the OAI harvesting protocol reveals digital resources previously "hidden" from users behind web scripts.OAIster currently provides access to 18,530,232 records from 1039 contributors. OAIster is a union catalog of digital resources. We provide access to these digital resources by "harvesting" their descriptive metadata (records) using OAI-PMH (the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.

Open Access Journal Collection (Beta)

The collection currently comprises 44 South African journals, which may be searched individually, and provides immediate access to the PDF versions of 6 000+ full-text articles. Of the journals in the collection, 14 appear on the Approved South African Journals list, the ISI list, or the IBSS list. New journal titles and issues are added to the collection on an ongoing basis.

Organic Eprints

Organic Eprints is an international open access archive for papers related to research in organic agriculture. The archive contains full-text papers in electronic form together with bibliographic information, abstracts and other metadata.

SocioSite

The SocioSite is a project based at the faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. We present the resources and information that are important for the international sociological scene. It links students of sociology to many interesting, sociologically relevant locations in cyberspace. The SocioSite is a comprehensive information system which is very easy to use. That is why it has become a very popular yellow guide for social scientists from all over the world. The SocioSite is a toolkit for us social scientists. It contains high quality resources and texts that can be used as wheels for the sociological mind.

SOSIG (Social Science Information Gateway)

The Social Sciences pages of Intute is a free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research, evaluated and selected by a network of subject specialists.

The Computation and Language Eprint Archive

An electronic repository of full-text papers in computational linguistics, natural language processing, speech processing.

The Digital Library of the Commons

The Digital Library of the Commons (DLC) is a gateway to the international literature on the commons. This site contains an author-submission portal; an archive of full-text articles, papers, and dissertations; the Comprehensive Bibliography of the Commons; a Keyword Thesaurus, and links to relevant reference sources on the study of the commons.

University of Trento Eprints archive

A digital repository (OAI compliant) of full-text scientific publications produced by professors and researchers of the University of Trento, Italy.

Uppsala University Publications

Full-text working papers and research reports in PDF format.

Virginia Tech - Electronic Theses

Searchable and browsable digital archive of theses and dissertations.

Voice of the Shuttle

The new VoS is built upon a database that holds information in individual, modular records and constructs the apparent relation of information items "on-the-fly" as the user requests it.

WWW Virtual Library

Catalog of Internet resources. Indexes cover a broad range of subject areas. Each entry within a subject area links to the appropriate Internet resource and is accompanied by a brief description and a relevancy ranking.

Yenza!

The Yenza! site was developed by the South African National Research Foundation in partnership with the Infolit Project of the Adamastor Trust. Materials on the site comprise a mixture of annotated links to resources in South Africa and elsewhere, and materials developed specifically for Yenza! In selecting outside resources, the project team has looked for materials which are highly rated by subject experts.

National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)

Search for statistics and full-text analytical publications from NCES, the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education.

National Academies Press

2500 full-text books in all science disciplines (behavioral science, biology, computer science, education, environment, mathematics, and more). From National Academy of Sciences.

Science Education

Resources for kids, parents, and teachers. Full text and abstracts/citations. Research reports and statistics. Science.gov searches over 36 databases and 1,850 selected websites, offering 200 million pages of authoritative US government science information , including research and development results.

Science Accelerator

Science Accelerator can search by keyword, author, title, date the following: Electronic full-text research reports (including DOE scientific and technical information) Energy citations (millions of them, going back to the Manhattan Project era)Ongoing research project summaries (what's happening right now in DOE science research) ; E-prints (journal article pre-publication drafts, scholarly papers, and more)Proceedings and papers from science conferences, etc.

Chemicals: Electronic Orange Book

Approved Drug Products with Therapeutic Equivalence Evaluations. Search by active ingredient, proprietary name, applicant holder, application number, patent.

Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) Report Collection : Energy

This full-text collection provides access to unclassified, unlimited documents. It is a growing subset of almost 42,000 reports referenced and available in STINET, which dates back to 1974. Subject areas include biological and medical sciences, environmental pollution and control, behavioral and social sciences, and patents and patent applications.

Nanotechnology (NTIS)

NTIS has over 700 publications in its collection on the emerging field of nanotechnology. This broad and interdisciplinary field has been growing explosively in the past few years. While understanding of nanotechnology is just beginning to unfold, its tremendous potential for revolutionizing the ways in which materials and products are created is just beginning to show significant commercial impact.

National Technical Information Service ((NTIS)

Comprehensive resource for federally funded scientific, engineering, and business-related information. The database provides some full-text access and indexes over two million publications back to 1990.

NasaTechnical Reports Server

NTRS provides access to NASA's current and historical aerospace research and engineering results. NTRS integrates three separate information collections and enables search and retrieval of information through a common interface: NACA Collection: Citations and reports from the NACA Technical Report Server (TRS), http://naca.larc.nasa.gov, are now in NTRS. The NACA TRS site is retired and no longer in service following the consolidation of citations and reports into NTRS. The NACA collection is historical information from the NACA period lasting from 1915 to 1958. NASA Collection: Citations and documents created or sponsored by NASA. The NASA collection time period starts in 1958 and continues to the present. NIX Collection: Citations and images, photos, movies and videos downloaded from the NASA Image exchange and served out through NTRS. NIX is a separate system and users can go directly to the NIX to search imagery as well as through NTRS.

OSHA/EPA Occupational Chemical Database

OSHA and EPA jointly developed and maintain this database as a convenient reference for the occupational safety and health community. This database compiles information from several government agencies and organizations. Available database reports include: "Physical Properties," "Exposure Guidelines," "NIOSH Pocket Guide," and "Emergency Response Information," including the DOT Emergency Response Guide. In addition, an all-in-one report, "Full Report," is available.

Patents: U.S. Patent Database .

This site provides full image access to all U.S.-granted patents back to 1790, with full-text searching back to 1976 and the full-text of published applications. The database also enables searching for references, which can include articles, reports, and proceedings.

Physics: Spires High-Energy Physics (HEP) Database .

The SPIRES-HEP database has been run by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center(SLAC) since the late 1960's as a database of particle physics literature. This database comprehensively indexes over 500,000 articles, papers, preprints, and technical reports. Most of the materials are available in full text, with coverage extending back to 1974.

PhysNet - Physics related free-access Journals

PhysNet Journals lists Physics related Journals, which are freely available (= free fulltext) on the net.

Access to Archival Databases (AAD)

Online access to more than 350 databases, which were created by over 20 Federal agencies. NARA plans to expand the system to more than 500 databases.

E-Stats: Measuring the Electronic Economy

E-commerce data were collected in four separate Census Bureau surveys. These surveys used different measures of economic activity such as shipments for manufacturing, sales for wholesale and retail trade, and revenues for service industries. Consequently, measures of total economic and e-commerce activity vary by economic sector, are conceptually and definitionally different, and therefore, are not additive.

Global Legal Information Network

Public database of official texts of laws, regulations, judicial decisions, and other complementary legal sources contributed by governmental agencies and international organizations.

O*NET Online

Key attributes and characteristics of workers and occupations. Information on skills, abilities, knowledge, work activities, and interests associated with occupations. Information in O*NET is available for over 950 occupations. Each occupational title and code is based on the most current version of the Standard Occupational Classification system.

National Archeological Database

The National Archeological Database, Reports module, is an expanded bibliographic inventory of over 350,000 reports on archeological investigation and planning, mostly of limited circulation. this "gray literature" represents a large portion of the primary information available on archeological sites in the U.S. Search by keyword, state, county, author, title, publication date, worktype, cultural, material, and more.

Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD)

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is the oldest producer of free e-books on the Internet. It is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or e-books. The collection consists of more than 20,000 e-books.

The Online Book Page

The Online Book Page by University of Pennsylvania Library has about 30000 e-books on different subjects.

Read Print site

It is very useful for historians and lovers of literature, as this site contains mainly the classics. It offers thousands of free books for students, teachers, and the classic enthusiast.

Internet Public Library

Internet Public Library Over 20,000 free books available online. The Internet Public Library's Mission Statement says: " The Internet Public Library (IPL), is a public service organization and learning/teaching environment at the University of Michigan School of Information. The IPL Online Texts Collection contains over 20,000 titles that can be browsed by author, by title, or by Dewey Decimal Classification". For questions about the online texts collection, or how to search, please see their help page.

OPEN ACCESS - PART I (Electronic Journals)

2008-11-16T17:22:00.005+05:30

Internet has not only changed the concept of its management where librarians or information managers have to played a crucial role but it has also changed the way it can be used by the users. It has become most powerful tool and showing silver lining to everyone involved in it by any mean.

Electronic journals are the journals which are available on the Internet. Scholarly Electronic Journals had always been the jinx of commercialization and led to acceleration of price. Ever increasing cost of these journals deprived academicians and researchers of developing and under developed countries from the scholarly information. But, mushrooming of ‘Open Access’ models/initiatives, at all nooks and corners of the world, has cracked the jinx of commercialization.

In this Part-I, ’ll discuss some of the important portals/interfaces of e-journals, available free of cost on public domain via the Internet.

Directory of Open Access Journals

The idea of creating a comprehensive directory of Open Access Journals was first conceived in the First Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communication at Copenhagen in 2002. The Directory of Open Access Journals is hosted, maintained and partly funded by Lund University. There are 3743 journals (as on October, 2008) in the directory and out of these 1305 journals are searchable at article level. It covers more than 220010 articles from all areas of learning.

HighWire Press

HighWire Pres is a division of the Stanford University Libraries. It is a largest repository of high impact, peer-reviewed content with 1185 journals and 4,971,514 full text articles from over 140 scholarly publishers. Higherwire-hosted publishers have collectively made 2,029,167 articles free and produce 71 of the 200 most-frequently-cited journals.

Bioline International

Bioline International is a not-for-profit electronic publishing service committed to providing open access to quality research journals published in developing countries. BI provides a unique service by making bioscience information generated in these countries available to the international research community world-wide.

Open J-Gate

Open J-Gate is an electronic gateway to global journal literature in open access domain. Launched in 2006, Open J-Gate is the contribution of Informatics (India) Ltd to promote OAI. Open J-Gate provides seamless access to millions of journal articles available online. Open J-Gate is also a database of journal literature, indexed from 4514 open access journals, with links to full text at Publisher sites.

AERA SIG Communication of Research - Open Access Journals in the Field of Education

To the best of our ability to discern, we have included only links to electronic journals that are scholarly, peer-reviewed, full text and accessible without cost. We have excluded professional magazines that are largely not refereed and commercial journals that may only allow access to a very limited number of articles as an enticement to buy. By restricting membership in this way on the list that follows, we hope to do what little we can to promote free access world wide to scholarship in education.

The Electronic Journals Library

The Electronic Journals Library is a service to facilitate the use of scholarly journals on the internet. It offers a fast, structured and unified interface to access full text articles online. It offers an effective use of both scientific and academic journals publishing full text articles in the internet. It comprises 41149 titles from all areas of research, 5166 of which are available online only. There are 19766 journals which are accessible free of charge to anyone.

FreeFullText.com

FreeFullText.com - provides direct links to over 7000 scholarly periodicals which allow some or all of their online content to be viewed by anyone with Internet access for free (though some may require free registration).

NewJour

NewJour is the archive for the list of new journals and newsletters available on the Internet.

Strategian

The Strategic Guide to Quality Information in Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Mathematics, Medicine, Physics, and Psychology .

Public Library of Science

PLoS is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.

BioMed Central

BioMed Central is an STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) publisher which has pioneered the open access publishing model. BioMed Central publishes 196 peer-reviewed open access journals.

Free Medical Journals

The unrestricted access to scientific knowledge will have a major impact on medical practice. The Free Medical Journals Site was created to promote the free availability of full text medical journals on the Internet. Under this site 430 journals are being accessible under open access model.

Indian Academy of Science

The Academy, founded in 1934, aims at promoting the progress and upholding the cause of science in pure and applied branches. The Academy's journals are 'open access' and full text is available as PDF files on each journal's website.

Open Humanity Press

Open Humanities Press is an international open access publishing collective in critical and cultural theory. Open Humanities Press journals are fully peer reviewed, scholarly publications that have been chosen by OHP's editorial advisory board for their outstanding contribution to contemporary theory. OHP's journals are independent, published under open access licences and free of charge to readers and authors alike.

Bentham Open Access

Bentham Open Access are launching up to 200 peer-reviewed open access journals. These free-to-view online journals cover all major disciplines of science, technology, and medicine.

LivRe!

LivRe! is the portal developed by CNEN - Comissao Nacional de Energia Nuclear (Brazilian National Nuclear Energy Commission), through its CIN - Centro de Informacoes Nucleares (Nuclear Information Center), aiming to ease the identification and the access to free journals available on the Internet. The Portal covers scientific journals, magazines, bulletins and newsletters. LivRe! portal is giving free access to 3466 titles on the Internet.

OPEN ACCESS

2008-11-12T09:43:00.004+05:30

Links and resources available below may be useful for those interested in pursuing open access publication or advocating for open access to others in the academic community, to grant-making institutions, or even to bodies of government. Resources supplied here include guides, presentation materials, and handbooks produced by SPARC and other organizations.

Readings

Publications, articles, and presentations related to Open Access, published by SPARC and other supportive organizations.

The Right to Research: The student guide to opening access to scholarship
Developed in close collaboration with students, this guide is a tool student OA advocates will use to engage more of their peers. The Right to Research: helps students recognize the problem of access; introduces the principle of Open Access; indicates how Open Access can make life as a student easier, advance research, widen access to those who need it, and increase visibility for student scholars; and offers ways to support OA. New in January 2008.

Open Access: A SPARC Brochure

This brochure, produced with the Association of Research Libraries and the Association of College & Research Libraries, makes the case for the open access model of scholarly communication and how it benefits authors, readers, teachers, scholars, and scientists alike. Facts and figures demonstrate how open access to scholarly research capitalizes on Internet connectivity to increase a research article’s use and impact. The brochure suggests steps authors of journal articles can take to provide open access to their work. This action can be at the local level in providing access to their own journal articles, and at a broader level to support open access publishers.

The brochure is available to download in PDF.

Directories

SPARC Open Access Program Survey
A resource for librarians and administrators creating events to promote open access among faculty members, this Web site will include details of conferences, seminars, brown-bag lunches, faculty meeting presentations, mailings, and every other form of outreach that you or your colleagues have found successful - or not.

Directory of Open Access Journals
This reference covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals in all subjects and languages.

Online Discussion Forums

SPARC Open Access Newsletter & Forum
With SPARC support, Peter Suber produces a monthly newsletter that offers in-depth analysis of open access-related issues. Read it online or sign up to receive the email version. You may also wish to join the exchange of ideas in the SPARC Open Access Forum.

SPARC Open Data Discussion List

According to the list’s moderator, Peter Murray-Rust of the Unilever Centre for Molecular Sciences Informatics at the University of Cambridge (UK), “The emerging Open Data movement shares many goals with the Open Access and Open Source movements, but encompasses its own distinct issues that are in need of examination by the scientific community. This list is intended to facilitate that important discussion.”

ARM Announces Industry's First Silicon-on-Insulator Physical IP Library for IBM's New 45nm SOI Foundry

2008-11-10T20:11:00.003+05:30

ARM in Collaboration With IBM and Soitec Ease Adoption of SOI Technology and Increase Achievement of Leading Power and Performance for the Semiconductor Industry

ARM today announced the industry's first Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) physical IP library including standard cell, memory and I/O libraries for IBM's fully enabled 45nm SOI foundry, also announced today. As lower power levels and increased system-on-chip (SoC) performance become more difficult to achieve with a traditional bulk CMOS process, SOI technology enables up to 30 percent better performance and 40 percent power savings at existing process nodes. The ARM(R) SOI library of physical IP is the only design platform of its kind in the industry and promises to significantly ease implementation of SOI technology and bring the benefits of this emerging process to a much wider range of semiconductor companies.

For full report visit at http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/ARM-Announces-Industrys-First-Silicon/story.aspx?guid={72FF99B8-B556-43A1-8AB3-AF24FC5A3872}

ETTLIS - 2008

2008-11-05T19:30:00.002+05:30

One can meet/interact the galaxy of library stars in the forthcoming International Symposium on Emerging Trends and Technologies in Libraries and Information Services (ETTLIS – 2008).

ETTLIS – 2008 is considered a most expected symposium by the library and information science fraternity, which will be held during 18 – 20 December, 2008 at JIIT University , NOIDA.

The event is being organized jointly by JIIT University , NOIDA and Delhi College of Engineering, New Delhi with the technical support of SALIC-Delhi-NCR-Chapter.

The following eminent professionals who will be deliberating their professional experiences and knowledge on current and speedy emerging issues in the Library and Information Science World.

Mr. John Lake, Librarian, Barbican Library, City of London Libraries, Archives & Guildhall Art Gallery, London, UK

Mr. Johnson Paul, Deputy Director, Publishing and Research Services, National Library Board of Singapore , Singapore

Mr. John Paul Anbu, Head Periodical, University of Swaziland Library, ,Kwaluseni

Swaziland, Southern Africa

Prof. Grace M. Mills, Law Library Directors and Associate Professor of Law, Hamline University , 1536, Hewitt Avenue , Saint Paul , MN55014

Mr. P. Earnest Harrison Perera, Librarian, The Main Library, University of Peradeniya
Peradeniya , Sri Lanka .

Ms. Harvinder Kaur, American Embassy, Public Affairs Lincoln Resource Center ,
Kuala Lumpur , Malaysia

Prof. Dr. Luzia Sigoli Fernandes COSTA - PhD on Information Science, Universidade Federal de São Carlos [Federal University of São Carlos].São Carlos - State of São Paulo - Brazil

Ms. Laksmi, Department of Information and Library Science, faculty of humanities, University of Indonesia , Indonesia

Mrs. Janaki Sinnasamy, Deputy Chief Librarian, University of Malaya Library, Malayisa

Dr. R.K. Chadha, Jt. Secretary, Parliament of India , New Delhi , India

Dr. Jadish Arora, Director, Information Library Network (INFLIBNET) UGC,

Ahemdabad, Gujarat , India

Dr.N.Laxman Rao, Professor, DLIS & Director-Staff Academic College , University of Osmania , Hydrabad

Dr.Harish Chandra, Librarian, Central Library, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras , Chennai , India

Dr. H.K. Kaul, Director, Developing Library Network (DELNET), New Delhi , India

Dr. M. Ishwara Bhat, Librarian, BITS Pilani, Rajasthan , India

Dr.. S. Majumdar, Librarian, Delhi University , Delhi

Dr. Jagtar Singh, Head and Dean, Punjabi University , Patiala

Dr. Usha Mujoo Munshi, Librarian, IIPA, Delhi

Mr. Sudhir Arora, Librarian, IGNOU, Delhi

Dr. R.C. Gaur, Director, IGNCA, Delhi

Mr. Yogendra Singh, Librarian, IIT Roorkee, Roorkee

Dr. Subhash Deshmukh, Librarian, GGIP University , Delhi

Registration Deadline: November 15, 2008

Symposium: December 18 -20, 2008

Please refer symposium website for detailed information at http://www.ettlis2008.com/

Contact to:

Dr. Sanjay Kataria
Organizing Secretary, ETTLIS 2008 &

Head, Learning Resource Centre

Jaypee Institute of Information Technology University
A-10, Sector -62, Noida (UP) India
Ph. +91 120-2590851, (M) +91 9810503341
Email: skataria.jiitu@ gmail.com , sanjay.kataria@ jiit.ac.in

Searching the Internet increases brain function

2008-10-19T15:37:00.000+05:30

UCLA scientists have found that for computer-savvy middle-aged and older adults, searching the Internet triggers key centers in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning. The findings demonstrate that Web search activity may help stimulate and possibly improve brain function. The study, the first of its kind to assess the impact of Internet searching on brain performance, is currently in press at the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry and will appear in n upcoming issue.

Read the full report at http://esciencenews.com/articles/2008/10/14/ucla.study.finds.searching.internet.increases.brain.function

Positions at IRMA

2007-04-11T12:47:00.000+05:30

Dear All,

There are some positions in IRMA (http://www.irma.ac.in/)

Institute of Rural Management Anand
P B No. 60, ANAND – 388 001

The Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA) is a premier, national level center for education, training, research and consultancy in rural management and allied fields. Founded in 1979, IRMA’s mission is to promote all-round sustainable rural development through professional management. Institute is looking for....

Senior Library Assistant (Library Acquisition Section) Senior Library Assistant (Library Lending Services)

With regards

Tension in the library

2007-04-10T12:41:00.001+05:30

From Australia: University of NSW library is in disarray after 100,000 books were culled and sent to Melbourne for storage, a tertiary union says. Students are confused and staff angry after books began disappearing without consultation. Some academics are travelling to Sydney University's Fisher Library to avoid the frustration caused by the upheaval.