This Sunday....

Its going down again. The Kid is in the building and B.C.U.C are doing their final show before jetting to Europe... Not one to be missed.

Preservation for Repository Practitioners

Aston Business School Birmingham, Thursday 27th May 2010.

In conjunction with the Repositories Support Project (RSP) and the Enhancing Repository Infrastructure in Scotland project (ERIS), we here at WRN are organising a free, one- day workshop at the Aston Business School Conference Centre Birmingham on Thursday 27th May, looking at preservation issues and repositories.

We have created a hands-on, practical programme with preservation tool presentations from the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and the PLANETS project as well as facilitated discussion sessions looking in to preservation issues and your repository, and how to construct an action plan and preservation policy to use in your institution.

For a draft programme and booking please see the RSP event page.

Glyndŵr score a century!

GURO- Glyndŵr University's research repository can now boast over 100 items!

GURO's content has increased by 1350% over the last 6 months bringing GURO's grand total of items to 116. Over half of these items are also full text.

Keep up the good work Glyndŵr!


If you would like to find out more about GURO please contact Misha Jepson, Repository Administrator at repository@glyndwr.ac.uk.

I LOVE SOWETO

Ek se! Wat se daar? Mjojo! This might sound impolite, but that greeting is filled with lots of what we call “Ubuntu”. The spirit of Soweto. In all its glory: Soweto is the place to be now; the epitome township of South Africa. Slowly shifting into the city zone; it’s the fastest growing township in the world. From any corner around the world: if you come to South Africa: besides Cape Town; you need to pass by Soweto.

Originally: South Western Townships; the original idea about it was to seclude black people from Joburg( possibly from the world) & therefore segregating the people further according to clans. Sotho’s were placed in a specific place, so was the Tswana’s, Zulu’s, Shangaan’s , etc. Therefore came around places like Klipspruit, Orlando, Diepkloof, Dube, White City(mzimhlophe), Mzimhlophe( White City), Mofolo, Zola, Emdeni, Mapetla & Dobsonville to name a few. With the different cultures & languages: this township was to become, known by many, for its multi greatness. All this came about during the apartheid regime, white supremacy that suppressed the black Africans in their own native land. This all was the peak of history in the making after the World wars.

Unknowingly it brought about change of mind sets of our people & the world at large. Voices were heard & the eyes of many saw. The voices that cried for freedom & the eyes that cried for the suffering of its own people. Greatness was yet to come from this special place. The greatness of Richard Maponya, Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo & the late Dr Motlana; in business & freedom fighting. On the other side of this beautiful nation there was music; which was a great reliever by Brenda Fassie, Yvonne Chaka Chaka, Sipho “Hotsix” Mabuse. These people were the savours of this place & they set the platforms/foundations for many of us to build upon for the future. Many followed them & followed in more admirations to build this town further than anticipated by the apartheid regime. More than 30 years later into recognition; this place has grown & surpassed every expectation had upon it. The future was born. From spinning cars of road rage art, fashionable pantsulas in dance mode that freed Sowetans from the american social stigma. Its a place that welcomed the world’s influence, it embraced everything that the world had to give & it gave what the world try so much to take from it.

Now we eating our hearts out in restaurants like Nambitha, Sakhumzi & Wandi’s set right in the centre of this ever rising location. A still to be contested clothing store called THESIS Concept Store; which has been shifting boundaries of fashion & youth culture to a maximum stretch. As done in Europe: youth & art development is very conceptual & building its own stage in the world. Township terror of skaters, designers(fashion & graphics respectively), graffiti artists, djs, music producers, film makers, dancers, singers, hip-hop artists, make- up artists, fine artists, pottery artists, entrepreneurs & writers. Urban evolution at its best from all creative art forms greatness is being bred.

Black or white we are now united & welcoming, today we holding no grudges; we just holding ideas & in need to work together to produce. This is why I love Soweto, for its history, culture & change. Its the world in a township....

Mendeley - Organize research, collaborate, and discover new knowledge

I recently attended Dev8D, an event funded by JISC with the aim of bringing together developers from higher education and other sectors in order to learn from one another and ultimately create better, smarter technology for research.

Part of the event included Expert Sessions where latest developments and solutions were presented. Amongst these was an overview of Mendeley - a free research management tool for desktop and web that has been described as a fusion of last.fm and iTunes for research papers!

Mendeley allows researchers to manage their libraries by automatically extracting metadata from researcher papers (in PDF format) which can then be used to create citations and bibliographies. Full-text searches are also supported and users can 'mark up' documents with comments on specific sections. But the real power of Mendeley lies in the social networking features and collective data gathered from users. Groups of like minded researchers can be created for sharing and collaboratively tagging and annotating research papers. The service also provides statistics about research papers, authors and topics allowing users to get recommendations and explore research trends.

The growth in users has been staggering since its release in 2008 - currently there are approximately 8000 institutions using Mendeley with 22,000 research groups collaborating and over 18,000,000 documents in people's libraries! It is quickly becoming one of the largest academic databases around and with funding recently secured from JISC and Europe, Mendeley propose to allow institutions to harvest documents deposited by their academics.

If you'd like to take a closer look, you can sign up and download Mendeley for free.

just some moodboards...

mood-boards...

inspired from/by the information provided on LII ELDELKOORT'S latest trend presentation in COMO, Italy.

she proposes the following : and these were "my notes"
migrating birds.... to integrate w. my current collection in development

I Love Soweto Campagin

So the young creative circle that comes around once a month, has joined hands and come up with the "I Love Soweto' campaign. Built on the same principles as the "You make Joburg Great" campaign but with less to no budget, this campaign is made to inspire the people of Soweto to take shape of this wonderful hood_burb of ours. The Rich history of this neighborhood is built in the trenches and is seen through the sweat and tears of it's inhabitants who differ in many ways. Not in many places around the world are you bound to see a cow's head (Iskopo) being sold next to a mall that has multinational food outlets like KFC.

This is just a small snippet of the campaign that has linked up a writer, photographer, models, fashion label, stylist and a DJ. These photo's were shot around Soweto on the weekend of the 27th of March and will be officially be launched at TSJS on the 4th of April 2010.






More Pictures and the whole story line will be made available via our flickr page soon.
Shot by Uviwe Mangweni, Styled by Nombulelo Dhlomo and Mangaliso Mbitsana and Modeled by Buli & Mangstar...