Madurai Kamaraj University is a Statutory University, established in 1966 by Govt. of Tamilnadu. It is recognized and funded by UGC and is a member of Association of Indian Universities. It has been reaccredited by NAAC with grade A.
The Directorate of Distance Education of this university was established in 1971 and has a student strength of about 1.20 lakhs. There are 37 Spot Admission Centres and 97 Study Centres outside Tamilnadu across the country and 15 Study Centres outside the country.

Recently this University was accorded the status of “University with Potential for Excellence” – A status conferred by University Grants Commission so far on 9 such Universities in the Country.

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• Diploma in Digital Pre Press (October 2008)
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“In the 70s, computer users lost the freedoms to redistribute and change software because they didn’t value their freedom. Computer users regained these freedoms in the 80s and 90s because a group of idealists, the GNU Project, believed that freedom is what makes a program better, and were willing to work for what we believed in.”
—“Linux, GNU, and Freedom,” by Richard M. Stallman, Free Software Foundation Founder

Casey Bisson, with the help of Jessamyn West and Ryan Eby, reports on open-source software (OSS) and its use and importance in libraries in the third issue of Library Technology Reports in 2007.

In “Open-Source Software for Libraries,” Bisson engagingly narrates the history of open source, explains how the OSS “movement” came about, details key players in OSS development, and discusses why and how open source can work for libraries.

More: http://maisonbisson.com/oss4lib/

Greenstone  POPULAR
      Greenstone is a suite of software for building and distributing digital library collections. It provides a new way of organizing information and publishing it on the Internet or on CD-ROM. Greenstone is produced by the New Zealand Digital Library project at the University of Waikato, and distributed in cooperation with UNESCO and the Humanity Libraries Project. It is open-source software, available under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
More: http://sourceforge.net/projects/greenstone/  

  
Avanti Circulation System
      The Avanti circulation system is a simple, scalable, networkable, client/server circulation system that can be deployed in small to medium scale libraries. The end product will be modular: consisting of a system core, circulation module, minimal OPAC, and network and user interfaces. The entire system is written in Java. Avanti 0.3.1 was developed using the Blackdown JDK v1.1.7 on a Linux system with the servlet classes being developed using the Apache Jserv servlet engine.
     More: http://www.avantilibrarysystems.com/index.html

CERN Document Server Software (CDSware)
      The CERN Document Server Software (CDSware) is the software developed by, maintained by, and used at, the CERN Document Server. It allows you to run your own electronic preprint server, your own online library catalogue or a document system on the web. It complies with the Open Archives Initiative metadata harvesting protocol (OAI-PMH) and uses MARC 21 as its underlying bibliographic standard. The CDSware is free software, licensed under GNU General Public Licence (GPL).
     More: http://cdsware.cern.ch/

DSpace Durable Digital Depository
      DSpace is a digital repository created to capture, distribute and preserve the intellectual output of MIT. As a joint project of MIT Libraries and the Hewlett-Packard Company, DSpace provides stable long-term storage needed to house the digital products of MIT faculty and researchers. For the user: DSpace enables easy remote access and the ability to read and search DSpace items from one location: the World Wide Web. For the contributor: DSpace offers the advantages of digital distribution and long-term preservation for a variety of formats including text, audio, video, images, datasets and more. Authors can store their digital works in collections that are maintained by MIT communities. For the institution: DSpace offers the opportunity to provide access to all the research of the institution through one interface. The repository is organized to accommodate the varying policy and workflow issues inherent in a multi-disciplinary environment. Submission workflow and access policies can be customized to adhere closely to each community’s needs.
More: http://www.dspace.org/  

   
Eprints Archive Software (EAS)
      EPrints is generic archive software under development by the University of Southampton. It is intended to create a highly configurable web-based archive. EPrints primary goal is to be set up as an open archive for research papers, but it could be easily used for other things such as images, research data, audio archives – anything that can be stored digitally by making changes in configuration. It works on Linux O/s and it needs MySQL, Perl modules and Apache webserver.
More: http://software.eprints.org   

  
Ibero-american and Caribbean Digital Library Proyect
      Ibero-American and Caribbean Digital Library Proyect is an initiative between UNESCO, University of Colima on and other experts of the region. The methodology that the registry of resources of information (metadatos) of any type of digital object “books, journals, thesis, music, images, audio, video, etc. As well as the formats and techniques for the digitalization, Design and development of the Z39.50 standard for the exchange of information. The objective is to create a great digital library of the region that this free one of author rights. In order to obtain software http://bdigital.ucol.mx consults the page or the version in CD-ROM to ask for a copy to the person in charge
More: http://bdigital.ucol.mx

     
Koha Open Source Library System
      Made in New Zealand by the Horowhenua Library Trust and Katipo Communications Ltd the Koha system is a full catalogue, opac, circulation and acquisitions system.
     
More: http://www.koha.org/

LearningAccess ILS
      The LearningAccess ILS is a full-feature Open Source library automation system developed for use by public and school libraries throughout world. The Institute will make this system available free to libraries that, because of cost, have been unable to achieve the benefits of automation. The system fully supports MARC21, Z39.50, Unicode andother critical lirbary standards as identified by IFLA.
More: www.learningaccess.org

     
Museolog
      Museolog is a web-driven software system for cataloging museum information. It’s software for managing information about museum artefacts collection written using Java/JSP. This software is licensed by GPL license. Museolog has been initially developed by EUROCLID within UNESCO HeritageNet project. This system used in museums of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan republics. Currently Museolog has one developer.
More: http://museolog.sourceforge.net   

  
OCLC SiteSearch Open Source Project
      The OCLC SiteSearch? software provides a comprehensive solution for managing distributed library information resources in a World Wide Web environment. It offers tools that integrate electronic resources under one web interface, provide flexible access to resources, and build text and image databases locally.
More: http://opensitesearch.sourceforge.net/docs/helpzone/main.html 

    
Open Archives Harvester
      The PKP (Public Knowledge Project)Open Archives Harvester is a free metadata indexing system developed by the Public Knowledge Project through its federally funded efforts to expand and improve access to research. The PKP OAI Harvester allows you to create a searchable index of the metadata from Open Archives Initiative (OAI)-compliant archives, such as sites using Open Journal Systems (OJS) or Open Conference Systems (OCS). Harvester version 2.0 includes the following features: * Ability to harvest OAI metadata in a variety of schemas (including unqualified DC, the PKP (Open Journal Systems/Open Conference Systems) Dublin Core extension, MODS, and MARCXML). Additional schema are supported via plugins. * Flexible search interface that allows simple searching and advanced searching using crosswalked fields from all harvested archives. Advanced searching of archives that share the same schema will be possible using fields as defined in the schema. When creating crosswalks for searching, admins can define  elements are text, date, or HTML multiple select interface widgets. * Ability to perform granular harvesting using setSpec and timestamps. * Ability to perform post-harvest and pre-indexing filtering/normalization on metadata. * User Interface with CSS and template-based HTML for easy customization. * Searching is highly scalable (creates an inverted index for searching).
More: http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=harvester

     
The Open Source Digital Library System Project (PYTHEAS)
      PYTHEAS1 (Powerful Yet Tactfully Helpful Electronic Arranger of Sources) is designed to be a multi-tier ILS (Integrated Library System). The two major building blocks for providing server-based metadata and information retrieval capabilities in PYTHEAS are MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloguing) and RDF (the Resource Description Framework), standards that define a format for describing objects and can package highly structured metadata for describing content and content relationships in physical and digital objects. The client environment for PYTHEAS can best be described as “web-centric”. The objective is to provide a platform and language neutral environment for accessing and manipulating the information in PYTHEAS.
 More:    http://web2.uwindsor.ca/library/leddy/people/art/pytheas/index.html

“Real India, the bottom of the pyramid, still lacks education, and guidance to a proper career.”

INDIA: Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance, says Will Durant. Which, perhaps, explains why the word `education’ doesn’t often excite people, despite the counsel of Aristotle that education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity.

“Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army,” instructs Edward Everett. Quite reassuring, considering that the markets and investors have gradually begun to recognise the value of enterprises in the education space, and more particularly in the education-technology sector.

An investor, even as a partner or franchisee, can look at betting on eLearning because of the inherent advantage of going faculty-less and the potential saving of money while ensuring flawless delivery, says S. Giridharan, Chairman and CEO, EdServ SoftSystems Ltd, Chennai (www.edserv.in). “Web-based deliveries are controlled better than just locally-accessible contents by way of CDs which are prone to piracy,” he adds, during a recent interaction with eWorld.

“My education… in arts and arms. looking for adventures in the world,” says Pericles, in the Bard’s work. And, Giri’s education has been in technology and entrepreneurship, as I learn during our three-hour conversation. Also, much like the `Prince of Tyre,’ Giri sees adventures in the eLearning market. It is wide open, addressing schools and college students, corporate learning, job-oriented learning, and skill development needs, he says.

For instance, an order that EdServ won a few weeks ago is a Rs 100-crore deal from the Government to impart modular employable skills (MES) training to school dropouts. Giri is positive about his company’s ability, through the `ePlacement’ vehicle, to reach out to rural areas and to attract talent seeking new jobs as well as change of jobs. “The ePlacement vehicle can offer more live job positions in non-IT domains in widespread regions, and more options of jobs with varied scales of pay.”

And his message to college students who will shortly be on the job market is straight and simple: Don’t be choosy with your first job; look at it as providing you with an opportunity to understand how to cope with a job and how to do a job well. “The focus should be on learning, irrespective of what the salary is and the location of job. Again, it is important to realise that IT (information technology) is not all. There are more blue chip companies in India that are non-IT,” sums up Giri.

Excerpts from the interview:

What are the challenges relating to the eLearning market in India?

Language of communication, access to affordable and faster broadband connectivity, interactive and intuitive e-content, ability to address curriculum-compliant content requirements of higher education, cost of access/usage of content, students’ acceptance of the self-paced mode of learning, parents’ acceptability of e-contents for their wards at a cost, and piracy are some of the challenges relating to eLearning.

Real India, the bottom of the pyramid, still lacks education, and guidance to a proper career. eLearning could be a solution that can elevate this section to apt employability in a scaled framework within a realistic timeframe.

The presence of multimedia-compliant systems in abundance, availability of broadband connections at competitive rates, regional language-based content for technical subjects, two-way interaction for doubts, and performance feedback with students. These, when incorporated in eLearning courses, can make them more popular and help in the faster adoption of the eLearning system in India.

You recently entered the online tuition services space. Is there a market for such an offering? What kind of inroads are you planning to make in this market?

Online tuition service is a huge market space in India. More than eLearning, this is online and face-to-face, with live lectures mode of learning. This covers up the dearth of right staff for explaining a topic of interest for a student wherever he/she is. Further, staff can address multiple students across many locations.

Online tuition services supported by good software system on the Web can further improve the planned execution of the tuition sessions, with tutors scheduling the classes and the students choosing the same. School students and college students spend a lot of money on tuition. Students believe that self-paced automated learning may not help much and that face-to-face training sessions are a must to pass exams with better scores. But then, only when a student’s interest is high in understanding, and the concept explained in any mode of learning, can one look at scoring high marks.

In India, every student is more exam-oriented rather than knowledge- or skill-oriented. This also makes a student look for tuitions.

We have been upgrading our 2tion.com to enter into college segment as online tuition service providers. Further, we are also merging our EdClass product which automatically schedules and brings in a tutor of choice to the student and also enables multiple students to join such sessions. Details of sessions, performance of tutors, students’ attendance and feedback information are also recorded for processing. Our plan with EdClass and 2tion.com is to make significant inroads into the school and college tuition market across India in the near future.

There is a lot of talk on the potential of the Government-private sector partnership in the school education space. Do you expect this to take off? What are the key challenges here? What is your strategy for the schools market?

The Government’s PPP (Public-Private Partnership) is being rolled out to cover school education under the Right to Education Act. The recent announcement that the Government will spend Rs 1.8 lakh crore on the Right to Education implementation in the next five years explains the priority of the Government in education.

Government schools require much-needed support in terms of infrastructure, teacher training, student performance improvement, all-round skills development and enhancement and also to improve the GER (Gross Enrolment Ratio) in secondary school education as well.

However, the key challenges are the methods of implementation. High investment requirements from the private sector can be a roadblock for many of the private companies to enter this segment.

Our strategy is to make ourselves ready for this space – quickly managing schools ourselves, so as to understand the complexity of running and improving school education. We would like to succeed in the challenge of elevating school education standards when we are given an opportunity to be part of PPP.

You have spoken about offering career seeding and mapping services at a very early stage in the schooling life. Why is it important to map careers for young school students?

Currently, school students are more focused on exams and scoring marks in exams. Teachers are into continuous assessments of students but still the assessments are more to understand their overall score in order to rank their performance among the class and make them pass. The students and their parents, on the other hand, lack exposure on the right career choice and the industry/domains that can fetch the career of their choice versus capabilities, especially the non-IT careers.

We see some students dreaming of careers in hotel management and Army, looking at some of those portrayals on TV/films. But, in reality, their parents push them to engineering (read computer science!) or management or accounting or medical, professions that fetch maximum salary and career growth.

Parents don’t understand the aspirations of their wards nor their flair, skills, interests and aptitude. By understanding the students’ nature and also their skills at a younger age, say, at 9 or 10, with the help of our system which also has information about industry, we are confident of guiding the students as well as their parents with counselling towards right careers that help the student to apply his/her mind better and grow in that career easily.

What is your view on the scope for innovation in education, using technology?

Technology-led education can transform the education standards that are prevalent right now in a big way. Education without metrics has no accountability and also does not provide the much-needed inputs to help students progressively learn and excel. Technology can play a huge role in shaping a student’s mind. Fun-filled learning, self-paced learning, metrics-based learning can all help a student in gaining interest in studies in stages and make him/her continue education even beyond higher secondary and till they reach their careers. Technology can also manage a huge repository of data – several thousands of students in a school – and provide the decision support data about students for the school management.

What is the role of assessments, and how does technology help on this front?

Assessments can be automated and made real-time. Assessments can also check a student’s preparedness for an exam apart from skill tests and can crucially provide inputs to improve a student further in order to make him/her ready for exams. Assessments, when automated, become a more scientific way of understanding and improving a student’s knowledge and performance. Automated assessments can provide a lot of decision support information which a manual assessment may not be able to provide all the time.

Do you feel that some of the IT initiatives in education can be working at cross purposes, remain in silos with little synergy or interoperability?

IT infrastructure in schools has come in a big way, especially labs with systems and servers with all software, such as office automation and animation/multimedia. Yet, IT is currently used in schools to provide learning in IT subjects and tools such as OS and multimedia which may probably give more push to a student’s dream of IT careers, which is not bad but too much of IT exposure makes a student neglect other non-IT domains where opportunities are in excess and blue-chip. I also believe IT can be used to store and process student performance metrics.

What is the placement scenario that you are currently witnessing? Have you seen a rise in the number of profiles on your site and a fall in the final placement? What are the types of jobs finding favour in this market place?

We find more jobs coming in nowadays on our Online Jobs Engine (EdCampus). Job aspirants access our system to understand jobs on offer, with inputs from our automated LAMPS portal through partner centres.

Lower-end jobs continue to come in a big way providing opportunities to diploma-holders and higher-secondary dropouts. Non-IT jobs have started coming up especially in tier-II locations. This, we believe, will increase the number of aspirants reaching out to our centres, because the moment a job lands in our system, all our registrants get an automatic SMS, thus making them visit our system to choose their apt job.

“The commission would be set up as a statutory body to address information and learning needs of the citizens of India,” he informed. He said the commission would also oversee the functioning of public and private libraries in India. A national census of all libraries would also be prepared by undertaking a nation-wide survey to know how many public and private libraries exist in India. Collection of census data on libraries would provide baseline data for planning, Pitroda informed at a four-day international conference organised by Delhi University on academic libraries.

The NKC recommended that the commission must assess the manpower requirements of the country in the area of LIS management, and take necessary steps to meet the country’s requirement through LIS education and training. “For establishing a well-equipped institute for advanced training and research in library and information science, the government should also set up an Indian Institute of Library and Information Science,” he added.

“DU has spent 2.2 crores on subscription of electronic resources. At present, Delhi University Library System (DULS) has access to 30 databases of the world under which students can access around 3,000 journals. And around 25,000 online resources in the form of monographs, conference, proceedings and audio-visual material,” said S Majumdar, university librarian and head of DULS.

Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/education/National-commission-on-libraries-to-be-set-up/articleshow/5114042.cms

The core collection for the project are runs of at least 20 consecutive years of:

Three 18th-century journals
Gentleman’s Magazine
The Annual Register
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

Three 19th-century journals
Notes and Queries
The Builder
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine

The 20-year runs were considered the minimum to provide a critical mass of material as perceived by the user. This core may be expanded by the addition of longer runs and/or other titles within the resources available. The project explored variables in the digitisation, retrieval and display processes which could affect both cost of image and index creation and the acceptability to the user. The variables were:

image creation: from both paper originals and existing microfilm copies. The effects of resolution, data compression and the use of black/white and grey scales were assessed
indexing: effective indexing is essential to user acceptability. The alternatives which were explored are OCRd full-text, both with and without fuzzy matching software, existing electronic indexes and the creation of electronic versions of printed indexes. The use of OCRd full-text is a major source of added value for some of the journals.
access to indexed images: from a World-Wide-Web platform.
Information was gathered on who used the service, how frequently and for what purposes and on the acceptability of images and indexes to users. The intended outcome was firm evidence and recommendations on the technological, economic and user acceptability aspects of digitisation which could serve as a basis for the development of a national digitisation programme for out-of-copyright journals.

More: http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej/

The Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek EZB (Electronic Journals Library) offers an effective use of both scientific and academic journals publishing full text articles in the internet.

This service has been developed at the Universitätsbibliothek Regensburg (University Library of Regensburg) in cooperation with the Universitätsbibliothek der Technischen Universität München (University Library of the Technical University of Munich).

All the time, the EZB is being further enlarged .

Meanwhile, 522 libraries and research institutions make use of this service in their daily work.

They collect the titles cooperatively and update the bibliographic data jointly in a central database. For each participating institution, we generate a range of electronic journals adapted to the respective library’s requirements. Each member can administer for itself the locally licensed journals and integrate individual user instructions by means of a decentralized specific license administration. Online journals on subscription can therefore be offered within the same system as free e-journals.

The Universitätsbibliothek Regensburg is in charge of the technical maintenance and further development

More: http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/index.phtml?bibid=AAAAA&colors=7&lang=en