STOP CHILD LABOUR

The International Labour Organization (ILO) has estimated that 250 million children between the ages of five and fourteen work in developing countries—at least 120 million on a full time basis. Sixty-one percent of these are in Asia, 32 percent in Africa, and 7 percent in Latin America.

The majority of 'main' workers are boys, whereas the majority of 'marginal' workers are girls; According to the 1991 census, about 90 per cent of working children live in rural areas; Children are engaged in various types of work, including those that are classified as 'hazardous', i.e. harmful to the physical, emotional, or moral well-being of children. An estimated 2 million children work in hazardous industries. Although there are inter-state and inter-regional variations in India, the factors that generate child labour, and hazardous child labour in particular, include parental poverty and illiteracy; social and economic circumstances; lack of awareness; lack of access to basic and meaningful quality education and skills; high rates of adult unemployment and underemployment, and cultural values of the family and society.

10 best extensions for Firefox 2

Mozilla Firefox incorporates functionality from the most popular extensions for the previous version.

Lots of stuff to try>>>>>>>>>>>>>>...

FoxyTunes
Tab Mix Plus
MR Tech Local Install
Download Statusbar
ForecastFox
All-in-One Sidebar
IE Tab
Firefox Showcase
StumbleUpon

As a social networker, bookmarker and site reviewer rolled into one, this extension wears many hats. "Stumbling" takes one click, and interactive icons make rating sites a cinch. Combined with the topic chooser, the additional one-click features give Web surfing a useful unpredictability TV just can't match.

Ook? Video Ook!

Koha ZOOM

LibLime, the leader in open-source solutions for libraries, announced that the Nelsonville Public Library System in Athens Ohio has just gone live with Koha ZOOM.Koha ZOOM includes a powerful, full-featured search engine based on Zebra, a high-performance indexing and retrieval engine. Koha ZOOM catapults Koha into the big leagues, improving standards-compliance, eliminating scalability limitations, and offering some of the most advanced searching technologies available. For those libraries who have been waiting for an open-source ILS that rivals the expensive proprietary systems, the wait is over. Koha ZOOM is a true enterprise-class ILS, suitable for even the largest of collections.

DSpace Community Survey-Results

DSpace conducted an informal survey of its open source community in October 2006.

Highlights

• The vast majority of respondents (77.6%) used or planned to use DSpace for a university IR.
• The majority of systems were in production (53.4%); pilot testing was second (35.3%).
• Preservation and interoperability were the highest priority system features (61.2% each), followed by search engine indexing (57.8%) and open access to refereed articles (56.9%). (Percentage of respondents who rated these features "very important.") Only 5.2% thought that OA to refereed articles was unimportant.
• The most common type of current IR content was refereed scholarly articles and theses/dissertations (55.2% each), followed by other (48.6%) and grey literature (47.4%).
• The most popular types of content that respondents were planning to add to their IRs were datasets (53.4%), followed by audio and video (46.6% each).
• The most frequently used type of metadata was customized Dublin Core (80.2%), followed by XML metadata (13.8%).
• The most common update pattern was to regularly migrate to new versions; however it took a "long time to merge in my customizations/configuration" (44.8%).
• The most common types of modification were minor cosmetics (34.5%), new features (26.7%), and significant user interface customization (21.6%).
• Only 30.2% were totally comfortable with editing/customizing DSpace; 56.9% were somewhat comfortable and 12.9% were not comfortable.
• Plug-in use is light: for example, 11.2% use SRW/U, 8.6% use Manakin, and 5.2% use TAPIR (ETDs).
• The most desired feature for the next version is a more easily customized user interface (17.5%), closely followed by improved modularity (16.7%).

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TOPAZ: End-to-end electronic publishing system

Given that this is the PLoS technology blog, I thought that it would be good to start with an overview of the underlying PLoS ONE architecture. PLoS ONE will be launched on the TOPAZ application framework. TOPAZ aims to create a publishing platform to facilitate the shift of the scientific and medical communities from subscription based journals to an Open Access online commons.

The core of TOPAZ is a digital information repository called Fedora (Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture). Fedora is an Open Source content management application that supports the creation and management of digital objects. The digital objects contain metadata to express internal and external relationships in the repository, like articles in a journal or the text, images and video of an article. This relationship metadata can also be search using a semantic web query languages. Fedora is jointly developed by Cornell University’s computer science department and the University of Virginia Libraries.

The metastore Kowari will be used with Fedora to support Resource Description Framework (RDF) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework metadata within the repository.

The PLoS ONE web interface will be built with AJAX.

How to use RSS to Create and Enhance Current Awareness Services

new article at LLR.COM

By Jason Eiseman

Excerpt:

"One final way to disseminate information from RSS feeds is through an intranet or portal, although this can be difficult and require some technical know-how. This is best used for subject-specific intranet pages. Remember our earlier search for Employment Law information sources? RSS would allow us to use those resources to create a dynamic, relevant Employment Law intranet page. Many portal products are starting to incorporate the ability to read RSS. Microsoft Sharepoint has several options for working with RSS feeds, most notably the Sharepoint Web Part."

Open Access in Biomedical Field-Current Status

"Current Status of Open Access in Biomedical Field-the Comparison of Countries Related to the Impact of National Policies"-Matsubayashi, Mamiko and Kurata, Keiko and Sakai, Yukiko and Morioka, Tomoko and Kato, Shinya and Mine, Shinji and Ueda, Shuichi (2006)

From the abstract:

"This is a presentation (23 slides) made at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Austin, Texas. It reports the current status of Open Access (OA) in the biomedical field, and compares some countries such as the U.S., the U.K. and Japan in terms of the OA situation. There are controversies about the definition of OA. After examining the requirements about OA, we recognized OA as the situation in which researchers could read the full text of articles in unrestricted way. In order to investigate the current situation of OA, 4,756 articles were sampled randomly from articles published between January and September in 2005 and indexed in PubMed. The main results are as follows: 1) The rate of OA articles was 25%, and 75% of all the articles were available online including electronic subscription journal articles. 2) The means of OA was classified into five types. Among them, the rate of OA articles by “OA and Hybrid OA journals” was overwhelming (more than 70%), and that of PMC was 26.2%. The rates of OA articles by “institutional repositories” and “authors’ personal sites” were considerably low (6.0% and 4.9% respectively). 3) When comparing the rates of OA articles by countries, Belgium ranked the first with 41.7%. The five countries indicated more than 30% in OA articles: Canada and India (38.7%), Brazil (36.4%), Australia (30.8%), and the U.S. (30.7%). Each country was different in the means of OA. 4) We explored the rates of OA for two groups; one group consists of articles published in journals with IF, and the other consists of articles published in journals without IF. The rate of OA for the group of articles in journals with IF is 20.6%, and that of articles in journals without IF is 30.8%"