28/09/2007

Free Burma

Hopefully Burma's military junta will soon surrender to the demands of ordinary burmanese people and the countries munks. For the last decade and a half the junta have stood for a hardline politics prompting economic stagnation and international condemnation.



I ENCOURAGE EVERY LIBRARIAN AROUND THE WORLD TO TAKE PART IN A SILENT ACTION AGAINST THE BRUTAL MILITARY JUNTA IN BURMA.

PRINT OUT A RED A4 PAPER WITH THE TEXT FREE BURMA AND HANG IT OUTSIDE YOUR OFFICE DOOR.

Recent book titles about Burma bought for our library collection:

Myanmar : state, society and ethnicity

Myanmar's long road to national reconciliation

Other books on Burma:

26/09/2007

Rift Valley Institute


The Rift Valley Institute is an independent research and educational
association based in Kenya and the United Kingdom. It has been working
in Eastern Africa, including Sudan and the Horn, since 2001. More background information could be found here.

For those of you interested in Sudan research a very nice feature on the institutes website is the Sudan Open Archive, with free research material.

"Users can conduct full-text word searches across the Archive, using the SEARCH THE ARCHIVE
box at the top left of each page. Type the search term(s) in the box
and press return. Use double quotes to search for a phrase or word
sequence. Detailed searches can be made with ADVANCED SEARCH. Word searches within documents can be made using SEARCH DOCUMENT.
A left-click opens a page of a document to full-screen view; a second
left-click returns the page to normal view. There is optional
search-term HIGHLIGHTING and THUMBNAIL page display. The BROWSE ARCHIVE button shows documents ordered under subject, date or author categories. All documents may be printed, or saved as PDFs".


Masai Women

The Masai of Kenya

-Granada Television International, 1974

Another film is added to our collection of anthropological film, this time it's a film from the highly acclaimed Disappearing World series from Granada Television.
The Masai are animal herders in the East African Rift Valley of Kenya and Tanzania.
The DVD is divided into different scenes:

1. Play the whole program
2. Masai concept of wealth
3. Elders and warriors
4. Female circumcision ceremony
5. A new bride
6. Threats and insults
7. Meeting the in-laws
8. Begging for cows
9. Husbands and lovers
10. End of warriorhood
11. The dependence of Masai women

It's possible to borrow the film on short-term loan, meaning two weeks.

On VHS I have just bought :

Witchcraft among the Azande

52 minutes, 1981
Film-maker and director: Andre Singer

This is also a film in the Disappearing world series.

Anthropologist John Ryle is following in the footsteps of Evans-Pritchard and his classic book: Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Much has changed since the original fieldwork carried out between 1926-1930 by Evans-Pritchard, Zande is not a static society anymore.

You could borrow this film only for 1 day.

25/09/2007

Ceedo Personal
#Programs run from any portable storage

"Easily installed on any portable storage gadget you choose – whether
it’s a thumb drive, an iPod, or a pocket hard drive – Ceedo Personal
allows you to enjoy the convenience and productivity of your personal
computer on any host PC."

Several  has  probably  experienced  the annoying fact that you don't have any user  administration priviliges on your computer. Well here is a small victory, from the Ceedo site you could install software packages onto your portable storage and run them together with the rest of your preinstalled programs. You could enjoy programs that you didn't have the possibility to download before, but I have to add that the available software available from the creedo site still is limited but would hopefully grow in the future. 

Any trace of your activities from the creedo software programs started from portable storage is gone when you choose to eject your portable device.

Here you could download Ceedo

Another possiblity is to use the U3 smart drive, another similar solution run from a portable storage device, but it has to be a U3 smart drive. The available software titles for the U3 smartdrive is probably slightly more than for the Ceedo solution, but the Ceedo solution don't set any limit to what kind of portable device you choose to install the software onto. The  U3  software  is preinstalled onto the U3  smart drive,unlike  the Ceedo solution where you have to install the software yourself.

Requirements for using the U3 technology is Windows 2000 SP4 / XP or higher, not yet supporting any other operating system.

Yet another solution is Portableapps.

"PortableApps.com provides a truly open platform that works with any
hardware you like (USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive, etc).
It's open source built around an open format that any hardware vendor
or software developer can use."

Portableapps unlike the other solutions also works with Linux.


17/09/2007

Anthropological Film

Dragvoll library, NTNU, Norway had no antropological films in our collection until recently, I have now bought several DVDs, they are  all located together with the rest of our DVD collection

Here are some samples:

A day in the life of a village in Africa
Scenes of daily life in the village of Sayaga, a small farming village in southwest Burkina Faso. Filmed in 2002 by Christopher D.Roy *,  Professor of African art at the University of Iowa.

Shamans of Siquijo

It's possible to lend the films for 14 days.

EditGrid

Online open source free spreadsheet with functionalities that makes it possible for instance to display the spreadsheet data on a Google Map or Google Earth.

The Geography Site

Coursework, teaching, lessons,information... English website with several useful links and also a couple of blogs (not very updated I might add...). Probably most information for new students, some useful background information and could be used for refreshing  old "knowledge".

10/09/2007


Visual search engines

Search engines on the web don't need to be only text oriented, we have search engines  combining visual display and text results like for instance Kart00.
Kart00 uses Flashplayer to draw interactive maps.


You also have several other visual search engines:


Pagebull
Quintura
Ujiko