Useful Library Apps for the iPad

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Rashid Faridi

Guest Post by Carol Brown

When’s the last time you thought, “Gee, I really miss scrolling around with a nice microfiche?” Between those and the Dewey decimal system, who’s got the time to mess with libraries anymore? Well, who else but college kids, that is. The college library will always be an indispensible feature of higher education, providing the study materials students need and the place to peruse them. But the future is digital, and iPads are a great way to bridge the gap between traditional libraries and the developing world of e-reading. Here are the 25 best library apps to invest in.

  1. My LibraryFor $4, your iPad becomes the memory center for your personal book, CD, and movie libraries. Catalog your books by scanning the ISBN with your iPad camera, track who you loaned books to, and get access to free eBooks.
  2. Book CrawlerBook Crawler takes book cataloging to new heights with cool features like reviews and local library availability when you scan the barcode, Dropbox support for backing up your info, and location awareness to see what others around you are reading and strike up online (or real-world) discussions.
  3. Library BooksIf you’re forgetful, this $3 app will pay for itself pretty quickly. It can track multiple library cards and let you know when you’ve got a book coming due. (Check to make sure your library is covered before purchasing.)
  4. OverDrive Media ConsoleThis free app gives you access to more than 18,000 libraries worldwide and lets you “check out” audiobooks and eBooks with a valid card. The titles expire on their own, so you don’t have to sweat late fees.
  5. GoodReader for iPadMashable called this the “Swiss army knife of awesome.” It’s got quick, smooth handling of huge PDF and text files and even lets you make notes on PDFs. You can also wirelessly sync between folders and devices and annotate with a slew of editing tools.
  6. MeeGenius! Kid’s BooksBring a children’s library to you with this free app featuring more than 300 titles. Turn your kids into little geniuses with the read-along technology that highlights and narrates words to help them learn.
  7. BookBuddy LiteThis app lets you share your book library over social media like Facebook and Twitter. You can also create custom categories for organizing your titles. And best of all, it’s free.
  8. iBooksYou knew there’d be an iBooks. This one lets you bookmark and take notes, find free samples of any book in the iBookstore before buying, and sync your books and PDFs to your other iOS devices.
  9. KindleSome people actually prefer using Amazon’s Kindle app for reading eBooks to Apple readers. It’s a simple way to access the more than 1 million titles the online retailer has for sale, plus more than 400 magazines and newspapers. Change your background color, font, font size, and more to customize your reading experience.
  10. StanzaThis long-time favorite of iPhone users is now on the iPad. It’s a free app that lets you peruse 50,000 titles from partner stores and 50,000 more free classics available thanks to Project Gutenberg, then store and categorize them once you’ve got them.
  11. ICDL- Free Books For ChildrenGive your kids a taste of literature from around the world with the International Children’s Digital Library app. There are free books from 60-plus countries with beautiful illustrations and English story summaries and titles from as far back as the 1800s.
  12. iResearchFor the next best thing to researching in the library, try this no-cost app from the American Institute of Physics. You’ll get access to scholarly journals like Journal of Applied Physics and Applied Physics Letters, whose articles you can then download with a personal subscription or a school access subscription, if your school has one.
  13. KoboKobo is a free app that’s packed with fun features, like the ability to share passages with friends and see what books they recommend. Kobo also lets you add books, both pay and free, to your library from email, Dropbox, or the web, and the reading experience is highly customizable.
  14. NYPL Biblion: World’s FairThis is the first app in a series that will be released by the New York Public Library to bring their famous research collections to a wide audience. You’ll find amazing documents, pictures, audio, and videos from the 1939-1940 World’s Fair.
  15. arXivStudy like a Cornell student with the help of this reference app. The school’s database hosts more than 500,000 PDFs of texts in the fields of math, science, physics, biology, and others that you can search by category. It’s like Microfiche 2.0.
  16. iSSRNFrom the Social Sciences Research Network, this is a great reference tool for social sciences and humanities students. More than 260,000 research papers are at your fingertips for viewing or emailing with this free app.
  17. Mobile AbstractsPubMed is a database operated by the National Library of Medicine and hosts more than 20 million medical journal abstracts. With this $.99 app you can search and view abstracts as PDFs for research. It’ll save your searches for you and let you bookmark articles you want to keep.
  18. Free BooksThe name’s a bit misleading, as the app costs $1.99. But once you fork that over you’ve got exactly 23,469 free books waiting to be downloaded to your iPad. There are no limits and no download caps.
  19. Local BooksBook lovers from librarything.com love this app that’s like Urban Spoon for books. It guides you to nearby libraries, bookstores, and upcoming literary events, but the fun part is socializing with other bibliophiles.
  20. ACS MobileThe American Chemical Society was nice enough to create this free app so that any interested students can have up-to-the-minute updates on scholarly articles published across a range of industry journals. Currently the database is at 850,000 articles and counting.
  21. British Library 19th Century CollectionSimilar to the NYPL collections app, this program delivers fascinating looks at books, engraved illustrations and maps, and other historic pieces from the 1800s. The app is free, and for a small monthly subscription you’ll have access to more than 60,000 titles.
  22. WorldCat MobileMapQuest meets iBooks with this app that will let you search local libraries for a particular title and then map you out the fastest route to the library with that book in stock.
  23. DCPLThis is the library app that started it all. The District of Columbia Public Library system made the source code for their app available to other libraries to make their own apps. If you live in the area of a library using this type of app, you can find nearby libraries, make and modify orders, and find reviews and recommendations for popular books.
  24. IOPscience ExpressThis gratis app from IOP Publishing (Institute of Physics) allows you to download up to 20 recently-published scholarly papers each month. Easily search by author name, journal name, or topic and find the data you need to make your report perfect.
  25. AccessMyLibraryFor those occasions you need a library but it’s after hours, try this app. AML uses your location to find libraries nearby and then allows you access to those libraries’ online resources.

previously published here

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China is Now More Urban Than Rural Beacause of Population Shift

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Rashid Faridi

National emblem of the People's Republic of China

City dwellers in China now outnumber rural dwellers for the first time as more people seek better economic opportunities, official figures show.The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said that there were now 690.8m people – 51.3% of China’s total 1.3bn population – in urban areas.The 21m who moved to cities in 2011 included a large number of migrant workers, according to the NBS.

In comparison, there are 656.6m people living in rural areas.

That city dwellers now outnumber the rural population comes as no surprise.When China released the results of its census – conducted once every 10 years – in April 2011, figures showed a dramatic rural to urban shift.It said that the proportion of the population living in the cities had risen by almost 14% in a decade – workers drawn to jobs in China’s factories and coastal industrial zones.

The census for the first time counted migrant workers where they were living, rather than where they were registered.Chinese academics have called for new policies to tackle the population shift, like making better social welfare provision for migrant workers.

Source:BBC

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Posted on March 6, 2012 by Rashid Faridi
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Urban Sprawl: India’s slumming ‘n’ shining

Posted on March 4, 2012 by Rashid Faridi

Even as the glitz quotient goes up in the cities, with the number of shopping malls and multiplexes rapidly increasing, there is a less glamorous, but faster, growth of the urban slums. Today, one in every seven city dwellers lives in a slum. While the number of slum dwellers has been growing 22% faster than that of the urban population, the number of slums has been shrinking. More and more people are living in fewer, albeit larger and better serviced slums.

About 14% of the urban population lives in slums and their numbers are growing faster than those of entire cities. According to estimates, while the urban population is growing at an average 2.7%, the number of slum dwellers has been rising at 3.3% with Urban Sprawl.

The National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) estimates that the slum dwellers’ tally has increased over the last ten years. In 1993, 60 lakh urban households lived in slums. By ’02, when the last survey was conducted, the number had increased to 80 lakh households. Take the average size of a household at five, and you’ve got 4 crores of the 28.5-crore people in urban areas, living in pitiable conditions. And if you estimate that even half the population living in slums will vote, its easy to understand why they’re such a valuable asset for politicians.

Slum dwellers can’t really complain that politicians remember them only on the eve of polls. Their votes have been rewarded with improved facilities in terms of drinking water, electricity, toilets and roads. The results of the latest NSSO survey conducted during July-December ’02, when compared with the January-June 1993 survey, show that state governments and the urban authorities under them have not only ensured that a large number of slums are notified, but have also played a significant role in ensuring that basic facilities improve.

In 1993, only about 75% of the slums could claim that their settlements was electrified, even though it may have only been street lighting. The latest survey places that number at 92%, and of this, 69% has electricity for both household use as well as street lighting, while another 18% has it for household use alone. ‘India Shining’, anyone?

Similarly, access to toilets has increased to 67% in ’02, from 46% in 1993. There isn’t any dramatic improvement in the garbage disposal since the number of slums without disposal mechanisms is down to 31% from 35%. However, the availability of water through taps has gone up.

Even as the number of urban slums declined by 8% between the two surveys, to 51,688 in ’02, from 56,311 in 1993, the number of notified slums increased 29% to 26,154 from 20,272, during the same period. That is, of the number of urban slums, including those recognised by municipalities, corporations, local bodies or development authorities, rose to 50.6% in ’02, from 36% in 1993. During this period, number of slum households doubled to 52 lakh from 26.4 lakh, making the slums that have access to better facilities more densely populated.

Is Our Urban Realm is Turning into a Big Slum?

Source: The Economic Times

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