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UP in
Partnership with the Library of Congress and UNESCO |
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UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA JOINS WORLD
DIGITAL LIBRARY PROJECT
The University of Pretoria’s Department
of Library Services has joined the World Digital Library
Project, making it one of the 27 institutions in the
world and the only one in South Africa and sub-Saharan
Africa to belong to this project.
Proposed in 2005 by the Library of
Congress in cooperation with the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO), the World Digital Library project will make
available on the Internet significant primary materials
from countries and cultures around the world.
The project’s goal is to promote
international understanding and to provide a resource
for use by students, teachers, and general audiences.
The Principal of the University of
Pretoria – Professor Calie Pistorius – welcomed news
that the University has joined the World Digital
Library.
“We appreciate this type of partnership
as it enables us to explore various ways of improving
our digital information management, database resources
management and service delivery. Through this project,
our collection will be accessible to other partners
across the
world,”
he said.
During negotiations for membership, the
University of Pretoria was represented by Dr Heila
Pienaar – Deputy Director, e-Information Strategy and
e-Research Enablement. In the final agreement, the
University was represented by Mr Robert Moropa –
Director of the Department of Library Services, while
the Library of Congress was represented by Mr James H
Billington - the Librarian of Congress.
"This
project is one of those international projects which is
a win-win situation as we do not give up our copyright
and intellectual property rights. This platform will
also be linked to our own UPSpace repository,” said Dr
Pienaar.
Mr
Moropa pointed out the importance of this partnership:
“By accepting the UP Library Services as a partner in
this project, it is extremely meaningful for us to be
associated with institutions of the stature of Yale
University Library,
Bibliotheca Alexandrina and the Library
of Congress. This gives us the impetus to represent the
University, South Africa and Sub Saharan Africa with
distinction."
Initially, the University of Pretoria’s
Library Services will be contributing and
sharing material from its digital collections on rock
art and Pretoriana.
“Further to our pursuit of being a world
class institution, being accepted as a partner for this
project is an acknowledgment of the standard and quality
of work that is being done through the digitisation
initiatives of the Library. As the only participating
partner in sub-Saharan Africa, it further positions the
University of Pretoria’s Library Services as a leader in
digitisation,” said Ms Ujala Satgoor - Deputy Director
at the University’s Department of Library Services.
Pretoriana refers to any media such as articles,
photographs, newspapers, brochures, architectural plans,
maps, etc on Pretoria. Please follow the ffg link to
view some of the items in the Van der Waal Collection
already on UPSpace (https://www.up.ac.za/dspace/handle/2263/94).
According to Ms Satgoor, the value of the
partnership between the University and the World Digital
Library cannot be measured in monetary terms as the
goodwill, reputation and exposure that it will bring to
the University is immeasurable.
“However when developing the Pretoriana
collection, the University can become the initiator and
custodian of a much larger Pretoriana Collection. It has
the potential to become a city-wide project,” she added.
The World Digital Library will make
available on the Internet, free of charge and in
multilingual format, significant primary materials from
cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps,
rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints,
photographs, architectural drawings, and other
significant cultural materials.
The objectives of the World Digital
Library are to promote international and inter-cultural
understanding and awareness, provide resources to
educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on
the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.
The
World Digital Library project will be launched at the
UNESCO headquarters in Paris, France on the 21st
April 2009.
Institutions that are members of the
World Digital Library project are: Library Services of
the University of Pretoria, Yale University Library,
Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Egypt), Brown University
Library, Central Library (Qatar Foundation), Columbus
Memorial Library (Organization of American States),
Iraqi National Library and Archives, The John Carter
Brown Library, King Abdullah University of Science and
Technology, KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of
Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, The Library of
Congress, National Central Library (Taiwan), National
Diet Library (Japan), National Library and Archives of
Egypt, National Library of Brazil, National Library of
China, National Library of Israel, National Library of
Russia, National Library of Serbia, National Library of
Sweden, Russian State Library, St. Mark Coptic Library,
Tetouan Asmir Association, UNESCO, United States
National Archives and Records Administration, University
Library in Bratislava, and the Yeltsin Presidential
Library.
For more information regarding the World
Digital Library project, please visit
http://www.worlddigitallibrary.org/project/english/index.html
Submitted by Ujala Satgoor
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Q&A
with Vikas Swarup at UP |
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When
the staff of the UP Library Services mooted the idea of
hosting Vikas Swarup (author of Q&A, which inspired the
award winning movie Slumdog Millionaire), it elicited
an overwhelmingly positive response. It was an
opportunity for us to host an author, who as a career
diplomat was literally sitting on our doorstep at the
High Commission of India on Schoeman Street.
A
collaborative event between the Departments of Corporate
Communication & Marketing and the Library Services
resulted in an extremely successful public lecture,
which was hosted by the Principal, Prof Calie Pistorius on
Friday March 27 2009. The interest and demand to attend
was indeed overwhelming and the audience, which numbered
approx. 500, was a truly diverse one. It included
students, academics, diplomats, movie buffs, aspirant
writers, etc. Vikas Swarup very graciously signed every
book that was placed before him at the end of the
lecture.
An
elegant cocktail hosted by UPLS Director, Robert Moropa
at the Merensky Library preceded the public
lecture. Saris and delectable snacks contributed to a
subtle Indian theme. I would like to acknowledge Monica
Hammes, Maureen Du Pisanie, Una Mgwenya, Alett Nell,
Bettie De Kock and Ryno..... who contributed in various
ways to promote and make this event a resounding
success.
Rassie
Erasmus of Bookma®k,
a UP bookstore enterprise, presented Mr Swarup with
a customised poster that is a collage of photographs
taken on the night of the Oscars.
Furthermore a competition was held that created a buzz
amongst students. Five questions based on the book were
posed and the prize of a signed copy of Q&A proved to be
a worthy incentive for participation. Five signed copies
of Q&A will be presented.
About the author
Vikas Swarup was born in Allahabad (India). He went
to Allahabad University where he studied History,
Psychology and Philosophy. He also made his mark as a
champion debater, winning National level competitions.
After graduating with distinction, he joined the Indian
Foreign Service in 1986, motivated by an interest in
international relations and a desire to explore
different cultures.
Diplomatic career:
Postings in Turkey (1987-1990), the United States
(1993-1997) Ethiopia (1997-2000) and the United Kingdom
(2000-2003). Since August 2006 he has been posted in
Pretoria as India’s Deputy High Commissioner.
Writing:
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Q&A is his debut novel.
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Published by Doubleday/Random House (UK &
Commonwealth), Harper Collins (Canada) and
Scribner (US)
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Sold translation rights in 40 languages
including French, German, Italian, Spanish,
Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Finnish,
Norwegian, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi,
Tamil, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Bulgarian,
Romanian, Polish, Russian, Japanese, Korean,
Turkish, Taiwanese, Thai, and Hebrew.
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Short listed for the Best First Book by the
Commonwealth Writer’s Prize
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Won South Africa’s Exclusive Books Boeke Prize
2006; the Paris Book Fair's Reader's Prize, the
Prix Grand Public, in 2007.
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Voted the Most Influential Book of 2008 in
Taiwan.
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Harper Collins brought out the audio book, read
by Kerry Shale, which won the award for Best
Audio Book of the Year 2005.
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The BBC produced a radio play based on the book
which won the Gold Award for Best Drama at the
Sony Radio Academy Awards 2008 and the IVCA
Clarion Award 2008.
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The film version of Q&A, titled ‘Slumdog
Millionaire’, directed by Danny Boyle, has taken
the world by storm and has won more than 70
awards including four Golden Globes, 11 BAFTA
nominations and a staggering 8 out 10 Oscars,
including Best Picture.
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Vikas's second novel Six Suspects was published by
Transworld in August 2008. It is being translated
into several languages and has been optioned for a
film by Starfield Productions and the BBC. Radio 4
has commissioned a radio play based on the novel.
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Vikas's short story ‘A Great Event’ has been
published in ‘The Children’s Hours: Stories of
Childhood’, a bold and moving anthology of stories
about childhood to support Save the Children and
raise awareness for its fight to end violence
against children.
Vika's has participated in the Oxford Literary Festival,
the Turin International Book Fair, the Auckland Writers’
Conference, the Sydney Writers’ Festival, the Kitab
Festival in New Delhi, the St. Malo International Book &
Film Festival in France, the 'Words on Water' Literary
Festival at the University of the Witwatersrand in
Johannesburg and the Jaipur Literature Festival.
Synopsis of Q&A
Set in
modern India, Q&A is a beguiling blend of high
comedy and touching melancholy. Cutting across humanity
in all its squalor and glory, Vikas Swarup presents a
kaleidoscopic vision of the struggle of good against
evil, and what happens when one boy has no other choice
in life but to survive.
It tells the story of Ram Mohammad Thomas, a poor young
waiter who becomes the biggest quiz-show winner in
history, only to be sent to jail on accusations (but
with no evidence or proof) that he cheated. It was the
basis of the 2008 feature film Slumdog Millionaire.
The novel was re-published under the title Slumdog
Millionaire after the success of the film.
Prof Calie Pistorius (UP
Vice-Principal & Rector) Prof Calie
Pistorius, Mr Vikas Swarup
Mr Swarup autographing
Mr Vikas Swarup autographing the 5
&
Mr Vikas Swarup (Author of Q & A)
& the Dept of Library Services
Monica Hammes' book
books which
Bookma®k donated
for the
Exco Team
student Q & A competition
Mr
Rassie Erasmus (Manager) &
Leaving for the Musion Lecture
Mr Swarup signing autographs
Guests listening to Mr Vikas Swarup's
Ms Gerda du
Plessis (Assistant Manager)
lecture in the UP Musion
from Bookma®k
Contributed by Ujala Satgoor
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Human Rights Day
exhibition |
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Special Collections mounted a display to
commemorate Human Rights Day. The exhibition also
portrays Access for All as on of the fundamental rights
of human beings, namely The right to have access to all
expressions of knowledge, creativity and intellectual
activity and to express their thoughts in public (Art 19
UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
The display is on view in the foyer of
Special Collections until the end of April 2009.
Contributed by Katrien Malan |
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Story Writing Exhibition at the Education
Library 18 March – 27 March 2009 |
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 As
part of Library Week Celebrations the Education Library
of the University of Pretoria recently hosted an
exhibition of Stories written and compiled by Early
Childhood Education students in 2008.
These stories were entered in a competition sponsored by
Oxford University Press. The stories form part of The
Story Reading Project which has run for a number of
years as an innovation outcome of the Early Literacy
Module in the Early Childhood Education Programme in the
Faculty of Education. Dr Ina Joubert who heads up this
project received an Education Innovation award in 2006
for this project. The creativity of the students are
really amazing and of the highest standard!
Sonja Delport and members of the library team at the
Education library worked really hard to ensure that the
exhibition was a great success.
To see more photos of the exhibition on Slideshare
Click Here!
The exhibition was officially opened by the Dean of the
Faculty of Education, Prof Irma Eloff on 18 March 2009
and ran till 27 March 2009.
In her opening address for the exhibition the dean read
a poem by Strickland Gillilan to emphasize the
importance of reading to the little child:
Richer Than Gold
“You may have tangible wealth untold;
Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold.
Richer than I you can never be --
I had a mother who read to me.”
Contributed by Johann van
Wyk
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Searching African
Architecture Online |
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A
collaboration project with the Department of
Architecture resulted in the following taken from the
March ArchiAfrica newsletter:
ArchiAfrica on-line
“Searching African Architecture Online
By
Anne-Katrien Denissen
After
working for over a year on the search engine for African
architecture we are finally ready to put it online!
Searching African Architecture is jointly
developed by the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and
Technology in Kumasi (Ghana), the Eduardo Mondlane
University in Maputo (Mozambique),
the
University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg
(South-Africa), the University of Pretoria
(South-Africa) and ArchiAfrika (Netherlands).”
For more
information :
http://www.archiafrika.org/files/AANewsletter_March09_ENG.pdf
What does
it mean for us ?
All our
Architecture’s UPSpace records are linked to the
database.
By
clicking on the following url, a search can be done on
“pretoria”
http://www.searchingafricanarchitecture.org/
Results,
by clicking on the links our UPSpace records are
displayed.
We see
this collaborative project as proof that we can
contribute valuable Architecture information to the
local, national and international community.
Contributed by Hettie
Groenewald
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Our University Library
making news in "Inn>Touch" |
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Contibuted by Soekie
Swanepoel & Anette Lessing
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Where do these names came
from? |
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There are many companies / brands / products whose names
were derived from strange circumstances
Mercedes
This was actually the financier’s daughter’s name.
Adobe
This name came from name of the river Adobe Creek that
ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.
Apple Computers
It was the favourite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was
three months late in filing a name for the business, and
he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the
other colleagues didn’t suggest a better name by 5
o’clock.
CISCO
It is not an acronym as popularly believed. It is short
for San Francisco.
Compaq
This name was formed by using COMp, for computer, and
PAQ to denote a small integral object.
Corel
The name was derived from the founder’s name Dr. Michael
Cowpland. It stands for COwpland Research Laboratory.
 Google
The name started as a joke boasting about the amount of
information the search-engine would be able to search.
It was originally named ‘Googol’, a word for the number
represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. After founders
– Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page
presented their project to an angel investor, they
received a cheque made out to “Google”.
Hotmail
Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via
the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When
Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the
mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in
‘mail’ and finally settled for hotmail as it included
the letter “html” – the programming language used to
write web pages. It was initially referred to as
HoTMaiL with selective uppercasing.
Hewlett Packard
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide
whether the company they founded would be called
Hewlett-Packard of Packard-Hewlett.
 Intel
Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new
company ‘Moore Noyce’ but that was already trademarked
by a hotel chain so they had to settle for an acronym of
INTegrated Electronics.
Lotus (Notes)
Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from ‘The Lotus
Position’ or ‘Padmasana’. Kapor used to be a teacher of
Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Microsoft
Coined by Bill Gates to represent MICROcomputers
SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the ‘-‘ was
removed later on.
Motorola
Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his
company started manufacturing radios for cars. The
popular radio company at the time was called Victrola.
ORACLE
Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting
project for the CIA Central Intelligence Agency. The
code name for the project was called Oracle (the CIA saw
this as the system to give answers to all questions of
something such). The project was designed to help use
the newly written SQL code by IBM. The project
eventually was terminated but Larry and Bob decided to
finish what they started and bring it to the world.
They kept the name Oracle and created the RDBMS engine.
Later they kept the same name for the company.
Sony
It originated from the Latin word ‘sonus’ meaning
sound, and ‘sonny’ a slang used by Americans to refer to
a bright youngster.
SUN
Founded by 4 Stanford University buddies, SUN is the
acronym for Stanford University Network. Andreas
Bechtolsheim built a microcomputer, Vinod Khosla
recruited him and Scott McNealy to manufacture computers
based on it, and Bill Joy to develop a UNIX-based OS for
the computer.
Yahoo!
The word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his
book ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. It represents a person who is
repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human.
Yahoo! Founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the
name because they considered
Contributed by Elna Randall
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April boek van die
maand / April book of the month |
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African basketry : grassroots art from southern Africa ©
2006/ Anthony B. Cunningham
& M. Elizabeth Terry
Contributed by Katrien Malan
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African Basketry is a unique contribution to African art and culture. More than any other African craft, basketry represents the finest blend of indigenous culture, environment and technology. Different types of basketry from southern Africa are featured in this book, with both historical and contemporary examples from Botswana, Lesotho, southern Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, western Zambia and Zimbabwe.
In the past, various basketry items reflected the lifestyles of the hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, fishing communities and agriculturalists who made them. Later, with rapid urbanisation and cultural change, some basketry styles and century-old skills disappeared, almost without a trace. More recently, there has been a dramatic increase in the international appreciation of African basketry as an art form, which has brought both its functionality and aesthetics into the limelight. The export of African basketry to collectors, interior designers and museums in the USA, Europe and Australia has flourished.
To date, no comprehensive book has been published on basketry in southern Africa. This has meant that many basketry enthusiasts have acquired "traditional" African basketry items with little background knowledge of their origins, historical context, use, or the raw materials used in their crafting
African Basketry provides detailed information on historical perspectives, weaving techniques, construction methods, designs, styles and raw materials used in basketry. The impact of commercialisation is also described, which has brought with itvarious benefits and challenges for basket makers.
Photographs of baskets from major museum collections in southern Africa, the USA and Britain, feature alongside unique images of basket construction and use. Previously unpublished black-and-white photographs taken by Alfred Duggan-Cronin in the early 1900's enhance the historical record.
African Basketry describes past, present and future trends, enabling the proper recognition of this art form in both time and place.
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AIS Intranet Newsletter Publication /
Publikasie van die AI Intranet Nuusbrief |
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Indien jy enige kommentaar
of voorstelle oor die nuusbrief het, epos ons asseblief
by
diana.gerritsen@up.ac.za
- ons hoor graag jou opinie.
If you
have any comments or suggestions about our newsletter,
then please mail us on
diana.gerritsen@up.ac.za
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we are very keen to hear your opinions.
To contribute, please e-mail
Diana Gerritsen.
Contributions can be in Afrikaans or English.
Om 'n bydrae te maak e-pos asb. vir
Diana Gerritsen.
Bydraes kan in Afrikaans of Engels wees. |
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Events this
month ...
Gebeure dié
maand ...
Birthdays this
month ...
Verjaarsdae dié
maand ...
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2 |
Sipho Mashabela |
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3 |
Karabo Rampete |
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4 |
Ms C M Lepota |
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6 |
Elsie Verheem
Gugu Mothata
Ivy Khangale |
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7 |
Johann van Wyk |
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12 |
Maureen du Pisanie |
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14 |
Johannes Moruputli
Susan Coetsee |
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21 |
Una Mgwenya
Mark le Roux |
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23 |
Alet Grobler |
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27 |
Salomie Stolz
Rayno Geyser |
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28 |
Andre Janse van Rensburg |
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30 |
Patrick Matsebe
Mabel Mashifane |
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"Laughter is the sun that drives
winter from the human face."
* By
Victor Hugo*
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