Hii Girls!!!😊
Writing blog after
a days gap.
Sharing with you all the interesting things I learned last week😊
You know girls, like a regular library card, SFIT library also provides
additional card with regular library card i.e Scholar Card for students who are topper in class, Merit
Card for students who achieves more than 8.6 GPA (Grade Point Average) in
exam and also there is Active User card for students who make maximum use of
the library. Isn’t it great?😊 If students wants a particular book and it’s not
available in library, students can request for the same by filling up the book
requisition form and it is procured after the approval of teacher, librarian
and principal. Learnt the process of how students can apply for new library
card and if the library card is lost what are the process to be followed.
Catalogued Post Graduate books, last time cataloged software has different section to catalogue under graduate
and post graduate books and yes also catalogued magazines and periodicals,
barcoded them, displayed them. They have a pigeon rack like we have in our
university library where we keep periodicals, same here they are used for
display of magazines and periodicals and to keep past magazines inside the
pigeon rack. What we saw or felt in our university
library during our search for periodicals for our project, I went through all the process we follow before the magazines or periodicals are kept on display rack. It was a new learning.
Learnt how to print book card, which we keep inside the book pocket, due card
where we stamp the due date. Also learnt practically how to stick the book
pocket, where to put the accession barcode, where to stick due card and putting book card, where to tape the classification code on the book etc…
Ma’am shared how they maintain bills of books and magazines they
order and what other documents is required when the bills are sent to the
accounts department. Right know the software they are using is Libsuite and soon they will be getting transferred to
Koha, so ma’am shared with me what are the important points to be kept in mind
before transferring a data to other software.
Valentine’s Day was yesterday and you might have also celebrated it. Last week our library selected red colour books which is part of the syllabus from each rack and kept it on display till Valentine’s Day, isn’t
it fun and something interesting? I loved their idea.😊
What I like the most about the library is that they care for the students.
They are there FOR the students, they think about the students comfort first.
They come up with new ideas every time on how they can assist students with their studies for eg: if the students need question
papers through email, they just have to give their name and email address and
by end of the day the student receives the soft copy of the question papers he
requested😊This is only one example I shared with you girls, there are many
examples I will share with you during my internship😊
These were my learning for last week. Looking forward to new learning tomorrow😊
Also wanted to share an article, it is little lengthy but it's a good article, whenever you get time do read.😊
This is the article which was published in 'The Guardian' newspaper. The article is a lecture given by a science fiction author Neil Gaiman at a Reading Agency annual on the future of reading and libraries. I hope you will like it😊
Link: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming
Neil Gaiman: Why our
future depends on Libraries, reading and day dreaming
Tuesday 15 October
2013 14.51 BSTFirst published on Tuesday 15 October 2013 14.51 BST, The Guardian.
It’s important for people to tell you what side
they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of
members’ interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about
reading. I’m going to tell you that libraries are important. I’m going to
suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most
important things one can do. I’m going to make an impassioned plea for people
to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these
things.
And I am biased,
obviously and enormously: I’m an author, often an author of fiction. I write
for children and for adults. For about 30 years I have been earning my living
through my words, mostly by making things up and writing them down. It is
obviously in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for
libraries and librarians to exist and help foster a love of reading and places
in which reading can occur.
So I’m biased as a
writer. But I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more biased
as a British citizen.
And I’m here giving
this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose
mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become
confident and enthusiastic readers. Which supports literacy programs, and
libraries and individuals and nakedly and wantonly encourages the act of
reading. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.
And it’s that change,
and that act of reading that I’m here to talk about tonight. I want to talk
about what reading does. What it’s good for.
I was once in New
York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge
growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth
– how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to
be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using
a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and
11-year-olds couldn’t read. And certainly couldn’t read for pleasure.
It’s not one to one:
you can’t say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very
real correlations.
And I think some of
those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate
people read fiction.
Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it’s a gateway drug to reading. The drive
to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going,
even if it’s hard, because someone’s in trouble and you have to know how it’s
all going to end … that’s a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new
words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is
pleasurable. Once you learn that, you’re on the road to reading everything. And
reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea
that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make
sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone:
words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words,
and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to
comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot
exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far.
The simplest way to
make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show
them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest,
finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting
them read them.
I don’t think there is
such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes
fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a
genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that
children should be stopped from reading. I’ve seen it happen over and over;
Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of
others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.
It’s tosh. It’s
snobbery and it’s foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that
children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different.
They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A
hackneyed, worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the
first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from
reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not
like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same
taste as you.
Well-meaning adults
can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they
enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century
equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a
generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.
We need our children
to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them
up, rung by rung, into literacy. (Also, do not do what this author did when his
11-year-old daughter was into RL Stine, which is to go and get a copy of Stephen
King’s Carrie, saying if you liked those you’ll love this! Holly read nothing
but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her teenage years, and
still glares at me when Stephen King’s name is mentioned.)
And the second thing
fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are
looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you
build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you
alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out
through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would
never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well.
You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you’re going
to be slightly changed.
Empathy is a tool for
building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than
self-obsessed individuals.
You’re also finding
out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And
it’s this:
The world doesn’t have
to be like this. Things can be different.
I was in China in
2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in
Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him
Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?
It’s simple, he told
me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them
the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not
imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to
Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about
themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they
were boys or girls.
Fiction can show you a
different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve
visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely
content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing:
discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better,
leave them different.
And while we’re on the
subject, I’d like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied
about as if it’s a bad thing. As if “escapist” fiction is a cheap opiate used
by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is
worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of
the world the reader finds herself in.
If you were trapped in
an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill,
and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn’t you take it? And
escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight
outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you
want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and
more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about
the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things
you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use
to escape for real.
As JRR Tolkien
reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.
Another way to destroy
a child’s love of reading, of course, is to make sure there are no books of any
kind around. And to give them nowhere to read those books. I was lucky. I had
an excellent local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could be
persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to work in summer
holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied
boy heading back into the children’s library every morning and working his way
through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets
in them, looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders. And when I
had finished reading the children’s’ library I began on the adult books.
They were good
librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught
me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no
snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this
wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me about the books I
was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They
treated me as another reader – nothing less or more – which meant they treated
me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an
eight-year-old.
But libraries are
about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication.
They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave
school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about
access to information.
I worry that here in
the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of
them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or
outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally.
But that is to miss the point fundamentally.
I think it has to do
with nature of information. Information has value, and the right information
has enormous value. For all of human history, we have lived in a time of
information scarcity, and having the needed information was always important,
and always worth something: when to plant crops, where to find things, maps and
histories and stories – they were always good for a meal and company.
Information was a valuable thing, and those who had it or could obtain it could
charge for that service.
In the last few years,
we’ve moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information
glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race
creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003.
That’s about five exobytes of data a day, for those of you keeping score. The
challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, but
finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to need help
navigating that information to find the thing we actually need.
Libraries are places that people go to for information. Books are only the
tip of the information iceberg: they are there, and libraries can provide you
freely and legally with books. More children are borrowing books from libraries
than ever before – books of all kinds: paper and digital and audio. But
libraries are also, for example, places that people, who may not have
computers, who may not have internet connections, can go online without paying
anything: hugely important when the way you find out about jobs, apply for jobs
or apply for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians
can help these people navigate that world.
I do not believe that
all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed
out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is
like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the
dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are
better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to
destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good
at being books, and there will always be a place for them. They belong in
libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can go to get
access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content.
A library is a place
that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it.
That includes health information. And mental health information. It’s a community
space. It’s a place of safety, a haven from the world. It’s a place with
librarians in it. What the libraries of the future will be like is something we
should be imagining now.
Literacy is more
important than ever it was, in this world of text and email, a world of written
information. We need to read and write, we need global citizens who can read
comfortably, comprehend what they are reading, understand nuance, and make
themselves understood.
Libraries really are
the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe
local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to
save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for
today. They are closing the gates that should be open.
According to a recent
study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, England is
the “only country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both
literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, after other factors, such as
gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into
account”.
Or to put it another
way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate
than we are. They are less able to navigate the world, to understand it to
solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able
to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable. All of
these things. And as a country, England will fall behind other developed
nations because it will lack a skilled workforce.
Books are the way that
we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are
no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made
knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and
over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long
outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.
I think we have
responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children,
to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find
themselves inhabiting. All of us – as readers, as writers, as citizens – have
obligations. I thought I’d try and spell out some of these obligations here.
I believe we have an
obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read
for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our
imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.
We have an obligation
to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries,
to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do
not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the
past and you are damaging the future.
We have an obligation
to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them
stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and
not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use
reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked,
when the distractions of the world are put aside.
We have an obligation
to use the language. To push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to
deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. We must not to
attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be
revered, but we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows
words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time.
We writers – and
especially writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our
readers: it’s the obligation to write true things, especially important when we
are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to
understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we
are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all. We have an obligation
not to bore our readers, but to make them need to turn the pages. One of the
best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot stop
themselves from reading. And while we must tell our readers true things and
give them weapons and give them armour and pass on whatever wisdom we have
gleaned from our short stay on this green world, we have an obligation not to
preach, not to lecture, not to force predigested morals and messages down our
readers’ throats like adult birds feeding their babies pre-masticated maggots;
and we have an obligation never, ever, under any circumstances, to write
anything for children that we would not want to read ourselves.
We have an obligation
to understand and to acknowledge that as writers for children we are doing
important work, because if we mess it up and write dull books that turn
children away from reading and from books, we ‘ve lessened our own future and
diminished theirs.
We all – adults and
children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We have an
obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything,
that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than
nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is,
individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and
they do it by imagining that things can be different.
Look around you: I
mean it. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. I’m
going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It’s
this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point,
imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground
and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you
in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things
in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over
and over and over, people imagined things.
We have an obligation
to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not
to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have
an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a
world we’ve shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.
We have an obligation
to tell our politicians what we want, to vote against politicians of whatever
party who do not understand the value of reading in creating worthwhile
citizens, who do not want to act to preserve and protect knowledge and
encourage literacy. This is not a matter of party politics. This is a matter of
common humanity.
Albert Einstein was
asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both
simple and wise. “If you want your children to be intelligent,” he said, “read
them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy
tales.” He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope we can
give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine,
and understand.
