International CALIBER 2009 (Convention on Automation of Libraries in Education and Research Institutions), an annual convention organised by INFLIBNET Centre, and IUC of UGC, in collaboration with Pondicherry University during 25-27 Feb 2009 in Pondicherry, India.

Digital presevation, Web 2.0 / Library 2.0, E-Publishing, Web Content Management were the main sub themes on which various papers were presented by well known experts and experienced speakers from all over the world on content management software, tools, technologies and strategies, standards and protocol, Web 2.0 and E-publishing etc.

Tutorials were delivered by well known experts on Web Content Management, Access Management and on SOUL 2.0.

I was delighted to attend the seminar/workshop on Information Services for Refugees and Migrants: ILIG (The International Library and Information Group of CILIP), on 14th October, 2008, and a social evening organised by CILIP and impressed by its functions and services towards the Information Professionals.

I found CILIP as a National Library Association equivalent to Indian Library Association, Delhi.

But I felt that the CILIP is more powerful than ILA in organising various Training courses, Conferences, maintaining 29 special interest groups, having access to number of online resources including databases, providing opportunities for jobs and careers, Policy and advocacy and many other services.

CILIP was formed with the unification of The Library Association and The Institute of Information Scientists. The formation of CILIP was not an easy process. It was formed after various permutations, combinations and discussions. The proposal of unification of various associations to form into a single body was initially made in 1989 and gave it a shape in 1998. Finally the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals was formally inaugurated on 1 April 2002.

Cataloguing and Indexing is a forum which is one of the 29 special subject interest groups. The group helps in the the organisation, storage, retrieval or dissemination of bibliographic information. It also helps to contribute to the promotion and maintenance of bibliographic standards and keep in touch with modern developments.This Group also promotes best practice, contributes to the development of metadata, national and international standards and formats and provides opportunities for learning and professional development. The members of the group are very active in publishing sector. It provieds all tools and resources for Cataloguing such as Organisations and Services, Cataloguing Resources, Cataloguing Internet Resources, Z39.50, Metadata and XML etc.

It is very interesting to know about the other activities of the group like actively engaged in the maintenance of current bibliographic standards, such as AACR2, DDC, MARC formats and the ISBDs, nominating members to serve on those organisations responsible for their development. The Group unites all those with an interest in bibliographic control, including not only librarians but also colleagues from the book trade. It holds an annual residential seminar and other meetings and workshops throughout the year. It publishes a quarterly journal Catalogue & Index and other specialist publications. Catalogue & Index is issued free to all members of CIG. It advises CILIP on matters concerning bibliographic control.

CILIP also provides Recruitment services for job seekers through Infomatch and LIBEX job exchange. It also helps in Job Evaluation. CILIP also provides various information services like Information Management, Knowledge Management, International information, Online Resources, Diversity issues, News bulletins, Information and advice enquiry service, Reader development, News bulletins, Information Centre etc.

FACET Publishing Bookshop is owned by CILIP which was earlier known as Library Association Publishing that publishes quality literature and it has a Facet publishing online shop too. The other Publications Update magazine, Gazette and Electronic access to JIS and JOLIS research journals, Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA), Emerald journals and database resources, Information Research Watch International, Keeping Within the Law are the other fascination services of CILIP. It also provides Professional developement service which includes many other services.

CILIP is a founder member of IFLA

CILIP also gives travel grants to the IFLA Conference for CILIP members and it also explains the benefits of IFLA attendance.

I wish in a developing country like India, efforts could be made to form a professional body like CILIP to foster the needs of Information Professionals.

MoDA is part of Middlesex University, Cathill campus, opened in the year 2000 and been registered as a Visitor Assurance Quality Attraction since 2002 and achieved Museum accreditation in 2006. MoDA’s News Archive contains numerous examples of press coverage relating to the museum.

MoDA works with the aim to preserve and hold in trust for society MoDA’s internationally important collections, which particularly relate to British domestic design and architecture 1870-1960. As a university museum, to be a centre of excellence it offers access, inspiration, learning and enjoyment to the user.

MoDA’s Collections hold a number of separate collections, which come together to form an outstanding resource for the study of domestic interiors, domesticity, household management, and the design and decoration of ‘ordinary’ homes.

MoDA currently is in the process of developing their own Research Repository, a searchable database of projects which have in some way been inspired or influenced by any aspect of MoDA’s collections and/or exhibitions. Their collections and exhibitions support the research of students, academics, artists and writers. The research repository will bring together details of the work they produce as a result of that research. This could be artworks, published papers, web-based projects or exhibitions.

The Domestic Design collection (1850-1960) contains more than 4,000 books, pamphlets, trade and retail catalogues relating to design for the home and household management. This collection is used by the researchers in many ways.

The Collections of MoDA include:

Domestic Design, Crown Wallpaper, Magazines & Journals, Silver Studio, JM Richards respectively.

Runnymede Collection at Middlesex University: The former library of the Runnymede Trust, a non-government think-tank in the field of race relations and racial justice since 1968, has books, journals, press cuttings and research files which is under the management of Learning Resources.

Any information regarding MoDA is available at the link http://www.moda.mdx.ac.uk/

I found that MoDA is a very useful source of information for researchers students and all others who are interested in Museology studies and related works.

The biggest book supplying company Dawson’s in U.K. was established by William Dawson in 1809 in Canon Street, London.

Now Middlesex University visits Foxhills House!

On 9th December Dawson Books played host to Middlesex University and the team from the library. Pictured above (l-r) is Sridevi, Usha and Zandi with Linda Barr at the computer. Linda was taking our guests through the finer points of our customer service operation. A fine day was had by all!

Below we see the team pictured in the Book Receipting area with (seated) Jean Gillard, George Hammond (standing left) and Wilf Muliner (standing right).

The pictures of the visitors from Universities could be found at the link http://www.dawsonbooks.co.uk/news/stories.html

Dawson Books is a long established company specializing in the supply of books and complementary services to libraries around the world. The activities and functions of Dawson‘s at Foxhills House, Welling borough, U.K., are really fascinating and appreciable. Their mission is to fulfill the objective of understanding customers’ needs which will be achieved by utilization of the skill set and knowledge base efforts continuously.

I feel that they have already achieved industry benchmark levels of efficiency by effective use of technology, the elimination of duplication and waste, with the application of process improvement techniques. Dawson Holdings are working with an aim to add value as the Media Supply Integrator for newspapers and magazines, academic books, new media and marketing point of sale materials with sister concerns in Paris and Madrid.

It is very interesting to know about the service of  complete processing of books along with lamination, spine tags, cataloguing and classification before dispatching them to the libraries. The services are provided according to the needs of customers.

One could have a splendid Virtual Tour of Dawson’s at http://www.dawsonbooks.co.uk/about/v_tour.html to know about the hardships behind  processing each and every book and to see the great establishment of Dawsons.

North West Academic Libraries consortium (NoWAL) has selected dawsonera as an approved eBOOK platform for all member libraries.

They are also maintaining a Digital Reference Catalogue of online reference works to which Dawson can process orders or annual subscriptions on behalf of libraries.  To help the researchers which publications are available the catalogue is arranged by subject.  Each entry provides information about the title and allows you to request trial access or contact them with a view to ordering.

I am very much impressed with the customer services of Dawson books, and wish to have an academic book supplier like Dawson in the developing country like India.

SHERPA is an unique body that holds tremendous projects and hosted by University of Nottingham, is developing open-access institutional repositories in universities in U.K to facilitate the rapid and efficient worldwide dissemination of research. It is investigating issues in the future of scholarly communication.

DOAR – Directory of Open Access Repositories (managed by University of Nottingham). The Directory of Open Access Repositories – OpenDOAR has over 1200 listings a SHERPA project, runs a full-text search service which searches all of the quality-assessed repositories that it lists in the OpenDOAR Directory. RoMEO , JULIET, SHERPA Search are the other services of SHERPA.

JULIET complements the RoMEO service provided by SHERPA for authors and repository administrators, which lists summaries of publishers’ copyright transfer agreements as they relate to archiving. Further information on Open Access is available for authors, including links to contacts and repositories which may be able to take eprints to fulfil funders’ requirements and recommendations. 

RoMEO provides the summary of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher’s copyright transfer agreement.

JULIET provides a summary of policies given by various research funders as part of their grant awards. Information about JULIET,  and the breakdown of funders’ policies is mentioned in the key.

CURL is the funding agency for JULIET development.

SHERPA Search SHERPA presents a trial search service for the full-text of material held in UK open access repositories, as listed in OpenDOAR. This has been made possible through the recent launch by Google of its Custom Search Engine, which allows SHERPA to define a search service based on all UK repository contents.

All the repositories and service providers of SHERPA could be found at the link http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/repositories/.

Various projects undertaken by SHERPA for academic and research repositories and SHERPA Resources could be viewd at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/ 

Open Access Journals: Other partner of OpenDOAR, Lund University, run the  Directory of Open Access Journals - DOAJ, which is the standard directory in this area, listing over 2000 peer-reviewed open access journals. The DOAJ also facilitates access to a growing number of individual articles from some of these journals.

The Open J-Gate indexes articles from 3000+ academic, research and industry journals. More than 1500 of them are peer-reviewed scholarly journals.

Various other Organizations and initiatives linked to SHERPA are mentioned below:

CURL (Consortium of Research Libraries) a groupe of the UK’s major research libraries which initiated the SHERPA project, eprints.org that provides free software “dedicated to the freeing of the refereed research literature online through author/institution self-archiving, Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model, “a conceptual framework for an archival system dedicated to preserving and maintaining access to digital information over the long term”, Open Archives Initiative (OAI), “develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content”, OSI The Open Society Institute (OSI), is a private grantmaking foundation, promoting democratic governance, human rights, and economic, legal, and social reform. The OSI is active in the area of Open Access to information and funds conferences, initiatives and projects in the area, RIN The Research Information Network gives strategic leadership in the UK to establish a national framework for research information provision, and to generate effective and sustainable arrangements for meeting the information needs of the professional research community, SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), “an alliance of universities, research libraries, and organizations built as a constructive response to market dysfunctions in the scholarly communication system.”

JISC, SPARC Europe, 7 Capacities, RLUK (Research Libraries U.K), WELLCOME Trust are the main funding agencies for SHERPA Projects.

Award Winning SHERPA brought revolution in Open Access.

ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repository) contains a total of 1226 Repositories according to the Geographical Region (Country), the Content type and System software are also mentioned.

Let us hope such Repository projects  and developements be carried out in all the Universities of Developing Countries.

Open Access archives or repositories are digital collections of research articles that have been placed there by their authors. In case of journal articles this may be done either before (preprints) or after publication (Post prints). This is known as ‘self-archiving’. These repositories expose the metadata of each article (the title, author and other bibliographic details) in a format compliant with the Open Archive Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).

OAIster is a union catalog of digital resources. It provides access to the digital resources by “harvesting” their descriptive metadata (records) using OAI-PMH (the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting). These resources, often hidden from search engine users behind web scripts, are known as the “deep web.” The owners of these resources share them with the world using OAI-PMH.

OAIster reveals these digital resources in an easy-to-use, searchable interface. In addition, It aims to:

• Provide one-stop “shopping” for users interested in useful, academically-oriented digital resources. We gather all potential digital resources out there in an effort to build a comprehensive digital union catalog.
• Eliminate dead ends. Users retrieve not only descriptions (metadata) about resources, they have access to the real digital resources.

When I had a discussion with Ms Katie Appleton, Manager, IR, in the library of Loughborough University, it was very interesting to know about the open access project carried out by their team and initiating the users of the library towards the Open Journal Systems (OJS) which is a journal management and publishing system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project through its federally funded efforts to expand and improve access to research.

Various guidance documents are available at http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs_documentation including OJS in an hour.

The Public Knowledge Project is a research and development initiative directed towards improving the scholarly and public quality of academic research through the development of innovative online publishing and knowledge-sharing environments. The Public Knowledge Project is dedicated to improving the scholarly and public quality of research. It operates through a partnership among the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, the Simon Fraser University Library, the School of Education at Stanford University, and the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University. The partnership brings together faculty members, librarians, and graduate students dedicated to exploring whether and how new technologies can be used to improve the professional and public value of scholarly research.

Its research program is investigating the social, economic, and technical issues entailed in the use of online infrastructure and knowledge management strategies to improve both the scholarly quality and public accessibility and coherence of this body of knowledge in a sustainable and globally accessible form. It continues to be an active player in the open access movement, as it provides the leading open source software for journal and conference management and publishing.

The Public Knowledge Project at http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs-journals provides a list of 1400 titles of journals in 10 languages for free online access.

The Open Journal System is a quite fancyful Open Access for Online Journals and beneficiary for the Researchers and Academicians.

A splendid collection of manuscripts are the land marks of Wren Library of Trinity college, Cambridge. These include 1250 medieval manuscripts, the oldest dating from the 8th century; a substantial portion of Isaac Newton’s own library; Edward Capell’s collection of early editions of Shakespeare; the Rothchild collection of eighteenth-century English literature; and the manuscript of Lycidas and Comus by John Milton and the original manuscript of A.A.Milne’s, Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner.

The library also holds growing collections of nineteenth- and twentieth century papers including those of the philosophers Henry Sidgwick and Ludwig Wittgenstein; politicians R.A. Butler and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence; economists D.H. Robertson and Piero Sraffa and others.

Wren Library is the great creation of Christopher Wren for his amazingly  beautiful art and architecture who also designed bookshelves and furniture executed in oak and stained to resemble cedar. It has a cocktail of the ancient and modern collections and could be viewd in the catalogue at the link http://lib-cat.trin.cam.ac.uk

All the books in the College Library are also listed in the Cambridge University Union Catalogue (Newton – http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk)

Cambridge University Library is one of the six legal deposit libraries in U.K. and Ireland. By virtue of legal deposit privilege it acquires almost each and every book published in U.K. and Ireland. Hence the library purchases the books mostly from the publishers of Europe, Canada and U.S.A.

The collection development policy of the library is very comprehensive to fulfill all types of requirements of the users.

It is amazing to observe the varieties of Information literacy programmes that are undertaken and introduced by the name Introduction to the Research skills programme, with face-to-face training in the form of presentations seminars, practicals and demonstrations with the  course descriptions and timetable for the ease of users on the website.  Online support is also provided with seminars in particular subject area and electronic resources along with hand-outs.

Information Literacy Programmes are also provided separately in the departmental libraries, as mentioned in the links below.

Betty and Gordon Moore Library

Squire Law Library

Medical Library

http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Courses/index.html

New readers are informed online with all the solutions for the queries like ;

• How do I get to the Library?
• When is it open?
• Who can use the library?
• What material does the library have?
• How do I contact the library?
• How do I find my way around the building?
• Where can I get a cup of tea?
• Where can I get printed information about the Library?

The solutions are presented with the help of Map, opening hours, Admissions webpages, library@lib.cam.ac.uk, list of contacts, Library floorplan, Tea Room etc.

The library maintains varieties of catalogues like Newton, catalogue for the libraries of the University, Janus, catalogues of Cambridge Archives, Copac, catalogue of the Consortium of University Research Libraries, Other catalogues and catalogue guides.

The Commonwealth Professional Fellowship programme contributes towards advanced continuous learning and professional development. Though the programme is for a short span of 3 months period, it is very intensive and challenging to complete successfully various varieties of activities with hard work.

Commonwealth Professional Fellowship is an extensive, multi-faceted and generally highly regarded (equivalent to US Fulbright Professional Fellowship) program initiated in 2002 – 2003. Commonwealth Scholarship Commission in the United Kingdom is key source for the Professional fellowships.  The Fellowship program brings accomplished professionals from commonwealth developing countries to U.K at a midpoint in their careers for three months of training and related professional experiences. It is developed explicitly to fill a gap in the professional and career development opportunities for the young professionals working in Commonwealth countries.
The Professional Fellowships Programme seeks to enhance the skills of mid-career practitioners in developing countries. Priority will be given to visits which will have practical implication in the areas of education, engineering, environment, governance, public health and technology. It is emphasized, however, that each of the themes can be broadly defined.
Objectives of the CPF program:

CPF programme helps to:
• Build on their strengths and understand their weaknesses as a manager in information services
• Raise awareness of their own and others’ behaviour to improve communication management
• Enhance their practical management skills – motivation, leadership, team working and personal skills
• Share the ideas and experiences with others at a similar level.
• Ensure the transfer of skills relevant to the needs of a Commonwealth developing country.
• To transfer the skills which may lead to practical benefits for the developing country.
• Provide a catalytic effect, either with in the developing country concerned or in establishing new relationships with the U.K.

Learning Resources Center, Middlesex University, London

When I have observed various functions of the Learning Resources Center, at Middlesex University I have learnt about the Library systems that are being used for various library operations on the campus; such as Horizon (Integrated library automated system), Talislist (reading list software), Athens (authentication software), web help desk, Win-Chill Inter library loan software, Online Databases such as  EBSCO’s A to Z list of access to E-journals, Ebooks, E-prints repository, News papers, subject Resources, Bibliographic records (source TALIS, Dawsons and other suppliers; Webfeat), Exam Paper Database etc.  Presence of links to free on line Electronic Resources  such as arlis.net (service is designed to help users to locate art, architecture and design publications, plus related materials) and www.nypl.org (New York Public Library Dance Collection Catalog) on the website of the Learning Resources is  very interesting. I had an opportunity to learn about the functioning of RFID circulation system and 3M magnetic strip security system and the activities of subject librarians. I have attended the orientation programme conducted by Sue Hurley the E – Resources Librarian, who works on Information Literacy in usage of E – Resources in the Learning Resources centre and very much impressed by her information literacy programme on the database DataStream for the students of Finance and Economics.

Oasis plus: WebCT Vista is a central E- learning teams’ page for providing online Information Literacy to the students.

The procedure of acquiring almost completely processed books at cheaper costs from the suppliers like Dawsons, Koutts etc. is just amazing which is possible through being a member of the SUPC Consortium for the Learning Resources Centre.

Databases Information systems 28

Copy right: When I had a talk with Ms Kate Vasili, Copy right Officer; she discussed all the issues related with the copy rights, and the details are mentioned in the link below.

Copyright Regulations, www.mdx.ac.uk/lr.asp