Monday, December 27, 2010

Do our schools and colleges encourage plagiarism ?

One of the common feedbacks that Indian students studying abroad are often faced with is producing material and submission texts that can amount to plagiarism. In common terms, plagiarism is a form of cheating. It is about borrowing someone else's ideas or words and passing it off as one's own.
Take for instance a project on 'tsunami' given in middle school. Most children will search the internet, print a copy of the picture of the raging sea, get a print out of tsunami from the website, paste it and submit it to the teacher.
The teacher will then grade and give the students marks. The student gets encouraged to do this the next time around and gets into the habit of plagiary. What should have been done and what the teachers must insist be done, is that the text be rewritten in the student's own words and proper credit be given to the source from where the idea came from.
In schools, the concept of reproducing verbatim, from text book still exists. Those students who are able to mug the text and reproduce it word for word are given more marks than those others who read the text, make sense of it and then write it out simply in their own words. Since students are encouraged to reproduce word for word from text book, when they go to colleges and universities abroad they so the same. In the western world, this is plagiarism.
Legal action for plagiarism is quite strict. All colleges and schools abroad have very strict rules, since plagiarism affects the image and reputation of the institution. The laws of copyright give the author right for original creation without having to file a patent.
Besides, printed word from a text book, newspaper, magazine or periodical, copyright extents to works of art, painting, music, drama, computer programming etc. Some Universities are so strict that after the first warning, a second instance of plagiarism could lead to expulsion of the student.
Our education system too doesn't allow cheating. However, cheating has a narrow connotation in our context. Copying from another child's notebook, or a scribble pad, or a note is what is cheating and considered actionable.
The book prescribed for the syllabus is actually a copyright material of the author; any reproduction from the book in bits or parts needs a reference to the book. Since our students do not learn this, they end up with plagiary.

There are several ways of avoiding plagiarism. Students must use quotes if they reproduce verbatim, use footnotes, references of the authors for the texts and ideas, they are borrowing.
Just changing the fonts or a word here and there should be avoided and complete re-writing of the central idea should be encouraged right at the school level.
There are several websites which help scan the material for dubious copies. In order to help our students be part of the international students' community, it is important that teachers at schools and colleges first themselves understand the importance of plagiarism and then guide students how to avoid it.

Source | Daily News Analysis | 26 December 2010

Bharat M. Chaudhari
School of Petroleum Management, Gandhinagar

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Installing DSpace 1.6 on Window XP

1. Pre-requisite Software
You'll need to install following pre-requisite software:
·         Java SDK 1.6.x or later (standard SDK is fine, you don't need J2EE)

If you install PostgreSQL, it's recommended to select to install the pgAdmin III tool

·         Apache Ant 1.7.x or later. Unzip the package in C:\ and add C:\apache-ant-1.6.2\bin to the PATH environment variable. For Ant to work properly, you should ensure that JAVA_HOME is set.
·         Jakarta Tomcat 6.x or later
·         Apache Maven 2.0.8 or later

2. Installation Steps
  1. Download the DSpace source from SourceForge and untar it (WinZip will do this)
  2. Ensure the PostgreSQL service is running, and then run pgAdmin III (Start -> PostgreSQL 8.0 -> pgAdmin III). Connect to the local database as the postgres user and:
    • Create a 'Login Role' (user) called dspace with the password dspace
    • Create a database called dspace owned by the user dspace, with UTF-8 encoding  
  3. Update paths in [dspace-source]\dspace\config\dspace.cfg. Note: Use forward slashes / for path separators, though you can still use drive letters, e.g.:
dspace.dir = C:/DSpace
Make sure you change all of the parameters with file paths to suit, specifically:

dspace.dir
config.template.log4j.properties
config.template.log4j-handle-plugin.properties
config.template.oaicat.properties
assetstore.dir
log.dir
upload.temp.dir
report.dir
handle.dir
  1. Create the directory for the DSpace installation (e.g. C:\DSpace)
  2. Generate the DSpace installation package by running the following from commandline (cmd) from your [dspace-source]/dspace/ directory:
6.  mvn package or install
Note #1: This will generate the DSpace installation package in your [dspace-source]/dspace/target/dspace-[version]-build.dir/ directory.
Note #2: Without any extra arguments, the DSpace installation package is initialized for PostgreSQL.
If you want to use Oracle instead, you should build the DSpace installation package as follows:
mvn -Ddb.name=oracle package
  1. Initialize the DSpace database and install DSpace to [dspace] (e.g. C:\DSpace) by running the following from commandline from your [dspace-source]/dspace/target/dspace-[version]-build.dir/ directory:
8.  ant fresh_install
Note: to see a complete list of build targets, run
ant help
  1. Create an administrator account, by running the following from your [dspace] (e.g. C:\DSpace) directory
[dspace]\bin\dsrun org.dspace.administer.CreateAdministrator
and enter the required information
    • Alternatively, Tell your Tomcat installation where to find your DSpace web application(s). As an example, in the <Host> section of your [tomcat]/conf/server.xml you could add lines similar to the following (but replace [dspace] with your installation location):
o    <!-- DEFINE A CONTEXT PATH FOR DSpace JSP User Interface  -->
<Context path="/jspui" docBase="[dspace]webappsjspui" debug="0" reloadable="true" cachingAllowed="false" allowLinking="true"/>
<!-- DEFINE A CONTEXT PATH FOR DSpace OAI User Interface  -->
<Context path="/oai" docBase="[dspace]webappsoai" debug="0" reloadable="true" cachingAllowed="false" allowLinking="true"/>

  1. Start the Tomcat service
  2. Browse to either http://localhost:8080/jspui or http://localhost:8080/xmlui. You should see the DSpace home page for either the JSPUI or XMLUI, respectively
For more about DSpace please vist Dspace web page

» You may follow DSpace cluster with:

o   LinkedIn

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

‘Omeka’ a free robust open source software for the display of library....

Hi Friends,

I am happy rather excited to introduce you to ‘Omeka’ a free, robust open source software for the display of library, museum, archives, scholarly collections and exhibitions of institutional repository, digital content and web publishing.

Omeka is a project developed by the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University.

Its “five-minute setup” makes launching an online exhibition as easy as launching a blog. Omeka is designed with non-IT specialists in mind, allowing users to focus on content and interpretation rather than programming. It brings 2.0 technologies and approaches to academic and cultural websites to foster user interaction and participation. It makes top-shelf design easy with a simple and flexible templating system. Its robust open-source developer and user communities underwrite Omeka’s stability and sustainability.

Until now, scholars and cultural heritage professionals looking to publish collections-based research and online exhibitions required either extensive technical skills or considerable funding for outside vendors. By making standards based, serious online publishing easy, Omeka puts the power and reach of the web in the hands of academics and cultural professionals themselves.

From the technical point of view, Omeka has good back-end technologies – Apache, PHP, MySQl and ImageMagick. Unqualified Dublin Core data, combined with Omeka-generated feeds and OAI-PMH harvestable data, give Omeka sites the ability to share data among different systems and with other Omeka sites.



I am quite sure library professionals, library technologist from all over the world would welcome, encourage and keep it up-to- date. In one word, future- proof. (As technology keeps evolving, so is the software. Remember, how far we traveled from command-lines, to menus, to GUI and now Web-based).



Yes, in my excitement, I forgot, you may download it: http://omeka.org/

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Online OCR Web Services

As you know that the most boring job for any librarian or Document manager is to convert the imaged PDF file in to text file means captured file such as digital photographs, scanned documents, printed books
But now most of your boring job will be easy with some web-based OCR services. Once you perform OCR on an image, you’ll be able to copy-paste or edit the text content of that image without any retyping and it also becomes more searchable. Most scanners ship with some sort of OCR software but if you don’t have a scanner, you can simply capture a photograph of the printed text with your digital camera or even your mobile phone and then use an online OCR utility to extract text out of that image.

Try Free Online OCR web service

NOW AVAILABLE: DuraSpace OR10 DSpace and Fedora User Group Session Videos

Ithaca, NY At the International Conference on Open Repositories (OR10) held earlier this year in Madrid DuraSpace sponsored a combined DSpace and Fedora User Group session for the first time.....More

The Difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0

The phrase "Web 2.0" was coined in 2003 by Dale Dougherty, a vice-president at O'Reilly Media, and the phrase became popular in 2004. If the next fundamental change happened in roughly the same time span, we will be breaking into Web 3.0 sometime around 2015.
Web 1.0:
1. The web experts call it Read-Only
2. User’s role is limited only to reading the information presented to him.
3. The best examples are millions of static websites.

Web 2.0:

1. Active interaction of common user
2. Read-Write-Publish actively interact & contribute to the web using
3. Webs 2.0 are Bogs, Twitter, YouTube, eZineArticles, Flickr, Facebook and every social networking portal.