Page 51 - DLIS104_MANAGEMENT OF LIBRARIES AND INFORMATION CENTRES

Management of Libraries and Information Centres

Notes 7.3 Good Offices Committee (GOC)

The Good Office Committee is a voluntary organization formed to establish uniform terms of
book supplies to libraries, and to ensure a fair working margin to booksellers and an efficient
service to the libraries. The Committee meets at regular intervals and after taking into consideration
the fluctuations in the currency rates decides on the rates of conversion governing sale of books
and periodicals. These rates are widely circulated amongst the libraries all over India either
directly or through booksellers. This helped to dispense with the need for the cumbersome procedure
of inviting tenders for a diverse product like Books. Is has not only facilitated procurement of
books by libraries but has also helped book lovers and others to meet their requirement of books
smoothly. The Good Office Committee has been in existence for more than 30 years and a pattern
for fixing exchange rates of currencies from time to time has been in existence all through. However,
there has been a crisis in the Good Office Committees since a new team of office bearers of Indian
Library Association (ILA) took over from April 2000. Since then, the Federation has been making
all possible efforts to sort out the problem faced.
The Federation continued to pursue the matter with the Govt. of India as it has been felt all along
that there should be nominee from the Government on GOC to impart sanctity to the committee
and give it much needed credibility. As a result of our efforts, the Department of Culture, Govt. of
India, convened a meeting on 30th April, 2003 on the issues relating to GOC which was attended by
several important librarians including three former Presidents of ILA. All of them said that GOC
is necessary; it has relevance, and that it should continue. Shri Jayakumar, Joint Secretary,
Department of Culture, who chaired the meeting agreed to give a nominee in the committee. In
the minutes of the aforesaid meeting a clear directive had been given to the Federation to go ahead
with the reconstruction of the GOC and ask for the Government nominee in the committee. In
pursuance of this, the Federation convened a meeting (13th June, 2003), AT New Delhi, which was
attended by a number of librarians and several members of the book industry. To make further
progress in the matter, it was postponed to have another meeting as soon as possible at which the
then President, ILA should also be present. However, as he regretted his inability to attend the
meeting because of personal problems and advised that we should involve, for our support, one or
two office bearers of the ILA at Delhi who were stated to be well aware of GOC. However, there
was no response from the other side to the efforts made by us accordingly.

7.3.1 Acquisition of Non Print
Acquisition is a Gnutella-based peer-to-peer client that is also capable of supporting Bit Torrent
designed specifically for Mac OS X. It is based on Lime Wire and is a shareware product, priced
from $25. Acquisition is more noted for its focus on user interface and integration with Mac OS X
than for its originality in features, making full use of Apple’s Cocoa APIs, and has integration with
iTunes. Acquisition uses parts of the Lime Wire core libraries, licensed under the GNU General
Public License (GPL). The graphical user interface and the open source, modified Lime Wire core
run as separate processes, communicating via Unix pipes, which allows parts of the software to be
relicensed. This follows in the footsteps of the precedent set by Apple’s proprietary X code suite,
which relies on open source components such as gcc and gdb.
Although Acquisition uses parts of Lime Wire code, it was not affected by Lime Wire’s decision to
disable its client. Recent versions of Lime Wire contained blocking code which could be called upon
by its parent company to disable the software in case of legal problems; Acquisition, like its sister
programs Cabos and Frost Wire among others, contains no such code, and thus remains running.

7.3.2 Multimedia Materials
Many nations are increasing their investments in education and education technology to support
the transformation of teaching and learning. Yet, not enough attention is given to the development
and availability of instructional content ware that makes the investments in hardware economically
useful and educationally meaningful. One possible reason is that equipping schools with radios,
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