Careers 360 magazine awards "A" grade to St. Francis Institute of Technology

CAREERS 360 – MAY 2012 issue covers India’s Best Engineering Colleges 2012.

Our Institute has been awarded "A" grading in the survey conducted by the magazine. For more details, click the link below:

http://www.careers360.com/news/8473-best-engineering-colleges-Maharashtra-Goa

or have a look at the following list sourced from the magazine website.

MAHARASHTRA & GOA

Institute	LOCATION	State	National
IITs/NITs/IIITs
IIT-Bombay	Mumbai	AAA+	Top
VNIT	Nagpur	AAA+	AAA
International Ins titute of Information Technology	Pune	AAA	AA
National Institute of Technology, Goa	Goa	AA+	AA
Other Deemed Universities/Central Universities
Mumbai Institute of Chemical Technology (UDCT)	Mumbai	AAA	AAA
NMIMS College of Engineering (MPST&M)	Mumbai	AA	AA
Symbiosis International University	Pune	AA	AA
Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth	Pune	A+	N.R.
State Universities/Affiliated Colleges
College of Engineering, Pune	Pune	AAA+	N.R.
Veermata Jiabai Technological Institute (VJTI)	Mumbai	AAA	N.R.
BITS Pilani- Goa Campus	Goa	AA+	A
Sinhgad College of Engineering	Pune	AAA	N.R.
DKTE Society's Textile and Engineering Institute, Ichalkaranji	Kolhapur	AA+	N.R.
Dr JJ Magdum College of Engineering	Kolhapur	AA+	N.R.
Government College of Engineering	Karad	AA+	N.R.
KJ Somaiya College of Engineering	Vidyanagar	AA+	N.R.
Sardar Patel College of Engineering (Andheri west)	Mumbai	AA+	N.R.
Sri Ramdeobaba KN Engg College	Nagpur	AA+	N.R.
Vishwakarma Institute of Technology	Pune	AA+	N.R.
Datta Meghe College of Engineering	Airoli	AA	N.R.
Dwarkadas J. Sanghvi College of Engineering	Mumbai	AA	N.R.
Fr. Conceicao Rodrigues College of Engineering	Mumbai	AA	N.R.
Goa College of Engineering	Ponda	AA	N.R.
Government College of Engineering	Aurangabad	AA	N.R.
Government College of Engineering	Amravati	AA	N.R.
Jawaharlal Nehru Engineering College	Aurangabad	AA	N.R.
Maharashtra Academy of Engineering	Alandi (D)	AA	N.R.
Maharashtra Institute of Technology	Pune	AA	N.R.
MH Saboo Siddik College of Engineering	Mumbai	AA	N.R.
Pillai's Institute of Information Technology, Engg, Media Studies and Research	Panvel	AA	N.R.
Rajarambapu Institute of Technology	Rajaramnagar	AA	N.R.
Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Technology	Mumbai	AA	N.R.
Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology	Nerul	AA	N.R.
Vidyalankar Institute of Technology	Mumbai	AA	N.R.
Walchand College of Engineering	Sangli	AA	N.R.
Bharti Vidyapeeth University College of Engineering	Pune	A+	N.R.
Cummins College of Engineering for Women	Pune	A+	N.R.
Finolex Academy of Management & Technology	Ratnagiri	A+	N.R.
Maharashtra Institute of Technology	Aurangabad	A+	N.R.
Marathwada Institute of Technology	Aurangabad	A+	N.R.
PES Modern College of Engineering	Pune	A+	N.R.
Pimpri Chinchwad College of Engineering	Pune	A+	N.R.
Rajarshi Shahu College of Engineering	Pune	A+	N.R.
Sinhgad Institute of Technology	Lonavala	A+	N.R.
Thakur College of Engineering & Technology	Mumbai	A+	N.R.
Abhinav College of Engg & Polytechnic	Pune	A	N.R.
Army Institute of Technology	Pune	A	N.R.
DY Patil College of Engineering	Pune	A	N.R.
Padmashree Dr. DY Patil Institute of Engineering and Technology	Pune	A	N.R.
PES College of Engineering	Aurangabad	A	N.R.
Rizvi collge of Engineering	Mumbai	A	N.R.
Shram Sadhana Bombay Trust’s College of Engineering & Technology	Jalgaon	A	N.R.
St. Francis Institute of Technology	Mumbai	A	N.R.
Tatyasaheb Kore Institute of Engineering and Technology	Kolhapur	A	N.R.
Terna Engineering College	Navi Mumbai	A	N.R.
Thadomal Shahani Engineering College Bandra (W)	Mumbai	A	N.R.
Walchand Institute of Technology	Solapur	A	N.R.
Yeshwanthrao Chavan College of Engineering	Nagpur	A	N.R.

Cancel the Subscription - Subbiah Arunachalam

It has been a slow but steady move to make scholarship freely available

Most of us spend a few hundred rupees a year on the magazines we buy for leisure reading or for keeping abreast of current affairs. But if you are a scientist, you may be shelling out a few thousand rupees for the journal your professional society publishes for its members. Of course, if you are a serious researcher, you may have to read or refer to many journals, not two or three. And you will depend on your institution’s library for those journals.

Till 20-30 years ago, most academic libraries, at least in the West, did not find it difficult to subscribe to most journals needed by the scientists in their institutions. Then things started changing and journal subscription prices started skyrocketing — some costing $20,000-40,000 — leading to what librarians call the serials crisis. Much of the price rise was caused by commercial publishers, such as Elsevier, Springer and Wiley. These three control most of the 24,000 science, technology and medicine journals and publish more than 40 per cent of all journal articles today. Elsevier reported a profit of 37 per cent of its revenue in 2011 (up from 36 per cent in 2010); the profit of the other two is no less than 30 per cent despite the recession.

A few years ago, academic librarians, even in the US, had to cut down their budgets for books and monographs to keep journal subscriptions going. Early this year, Harvard, reputed to have the richest endowment among universities, announced that it was finding it to difficult to hold on to its subscriptions and requested its faculty to publish their work in “open access journals” which would be free to read and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls. The irony of it all was summed up nicely by Professor Robert Darnton, director of libraries at Harvard: “We faculty do the research, write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all of it for free, and then we buy back the results of our labour at outrageous prices.”

A few months ago, a Fields Medal winner, mathematician Timothy Gowers of Cambridge, made it publicly known that he had stopped publishing in, refereeing for and being on the editorial boards of journals published by Elsevier. Gowers created a website called The Cost of Knowledge and close to 11,000 scientists from around the world have signed it already, pledging to boycott Elsevier journals.

Cost, however, is only part of the issue. A more serious issue is the exclusive control enjoyed by publishers over how research gets distributed and shared. They demand that authors surrender copyright to the papers they publish and use it to throttle scholarly communication and hinder the progress of science. It is common sense that if we make scholarly information freely available it will reach a larger audience and help advance further research and lead to wider economic benefits.

The boycott had a salutary effect. Elsevier withdrew its lobbying for the rather absurd Research Works Act, which, if passed in the US Congress, would kill public access to federally funded research and reverse the mandate of the National Institutes of Health putting in one go all the 21 million freely available records in the PubMed library into a fee-to-see system.

Long before Gowers’s boycott of Elsevier and Harvard’s request to its faculty, there have been many stellar initiatives to usher in an era of open access to science and scholarship. For example, all seven research councils in the UK have mandated open access to research funded by them. So has the Wellcome Trust, the world’s largest private-sector funder of life science research. Apart from these funder mandates, there are many institutional mandates, including the ones at ICRISAT, Hyderabad, the National Institute of Oceanography, Goa, and the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela. All these developments have been meticulously chronicled by the philosophy professor, Peter Suber, in the US and the technology writer, Richard Poynder, in the UK.

Recently, the British government enlisted the cooperation of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to help make all taxpayer-funded academic research in Britain available online to anyone who wants to read or use it. Says David Willetts, minister for universities and science: “Giving people the right to roam freely over publicly funded research will usher in a new era of academic discovery and collaboration, and will put the UK at the very forefront of open research.”

In India, though, there appears to be very little enthusiasm among the leaders of the science establishment. Neither the office of the principal scientific adviser nor the department of science and technology seems to have shown any interest in mandating open access to taxpayer-funded research. The National Knowledge Commission has recommended mandating open access to all publicly funded research, but it is not clear who will implement the recommendation. Right now, it is left to individuals to promote open access in India.

Source: The Indian Express dated 8th. May, 2012.

CPD23: Thing 2 - Investigate other blogs

CPD23: Week 1
Thing 2 - Investigate some other blogs

I am incessantly exploring other blogs to catch up with the various blogging platforms, the design and layout of information, the frequency of updates and so on to be more innovative. All of the blogs on my blogroll are mainly academic library blogs, ranging from Library @ Kendriya Vidyalaya Pattom to Peter Scott’s library blog. An extensive list of other blogs (the best ones) can be located at Salem Press Library Blog Awards and Edublog Awards sites respectively. Truly mentioning, I have explored the first (Serial No. 1) blogs at both the above mentioned websites.  Other blogs which I intend to follow are:

Drexel University Library – Engineering Library

Snell Snippets – NorthEastern Libraries

I hope this online course helps me to gain insight into the world of digital vibes. I have been blogging (i.e giving updates based on newspaper clippings and the like) for the past 2 years now, but creating a blog and making it known and popular to everybody is imperative, I feel.  And this is the main reason, why “Reflective Writing” is important. I get to know my “to-do” list.

- Chinmayee Bhange

SixthSense Project by Pranav Mistry

What next after Cell Phone and Google Glass?...Sixth Sense - a mind boggling project by Pranav Mistry. Click on the link below for more details...

http://myxcelsius.com/2009/10/09/ted-pattie-maes-and-pranav-mistry-demo-sixthsense/

CPD 23: Thing 1 - Blogs and Blogging

CPD23: Week 1

Thing 1 – Blogs and Blogging

The more I read about Librarians and the joy of “Librarianship” per se, the more I tend to glorify the need for reflective practice. So here goes me...

Image Courtesy: MS Office Images

I started my career in 2004 with St. Francis Institute of Technology, Mumbai after having done a Master’s in Library and Information Science from the coveted SHPT School of Library Science (SNDT Womens’University, Mumbai, Maharashtra – INDIA. My research interests include: Digital Preservation, Disaster Management in Libraries, Information Literacy and e-learning.

Thing 1 – I learnt about CPD23 from the Wiki Educator page of Dr. Indira Koneru – a very informed and tech-savvy librarian, I must admit!

I registered for the CPD23 online course in its second stint as I wish to learn how efficiently social media can be put to practice in academic libraries. I am happy since this is a self-paced course and as such does not pressurize me to meet the deadlines!

I already have a blog – SFIT Library Blog on which I blog fair enough and a Facebook presence too!  Off-late, I am working on implementing the e- submission of projects of B.E. students.

- Chinmayee Bhange

15 Vintage Photos of Librarians

Click here for the link