Leadership Qualities: Librarianship in Digital Era
This paper finds out the ways of traditional leadership in the LIS field. It also attempts to cover the new challenges that are cropping up in the recent years. In due course it tried to find out the qualities of leadership that helps to suit the need of digital librarianship. It attempts to present a framework to achieve goal and mission i.e. the ultimate user centered LIS universe under the dynamic leadership of the digital librarian.
The role of a digital librarian in the management of digital information systems (DIS)
Stresses that the multimedia nature of the next generation of digital libraries requires the digital librarians (DL) to be essentially a type of specialist librarian who has to manage and organize the digital library, handle the specialized tasks of massive digitization, storage, access, digital knowledge mining, digital reference services, electronic information services, search co-ordination, and manage the archive and its access. The digital librarian acts as guardian of the information superhighway/the universal digital library or the global digital library and acts as a symbiotic human-machine guru. This article also highlights the roles and functions of a DL in information retrieval, content delivery, navigation, and browsing. It envisages the professional education and training for digital librarians in the management of digital information systems. It denotes the DL's interface functions, roles, skills and competencies for the management of digital information systems in the important areas of imaging technologies, optical character recognition, markup languages, cataloguing, metadata, multimedia indexing and database technology, user interface design, programming, and Web technology. This paper finally advocates and targets the task of creating a new job title - digital librarian - to take care of digital libraries and to manage the digital information system.
A wireless self-powered urinary incontinence sensor system
A self-powered urinary incontinence sensor system consisting of a disposable urine-activated coin battery and a wireless transmitter has been developed as an application for wireless sensor networks. The urine-activated battery makes possible both the sensing of urine leakage and self-powered operation. An intermittent power-supply circuit that uses an electrical double-layer capacitor (EDLC) with a small internal resistance suppresses the supply voltage drop due to the large internal resistance of the battery. This circuit and a 1-V SAW oscillator reduce the power dissipation of a wireless transmitter. The SAW oscillator quickly responds to the on-off control of the power supply, which makes it suitable for intermittent operation. To verify the effectiveness of the circuit scheme, we fabricated a prototype sensor system. When the volume of urine is 0.2 ml, the battery outputs a voltage of over 1.3 V; and the sensor system can transmit signals over a distance of 50 cm.