The Scholar’s Space

For large parts of the West’s intellectual history, things worked the other way round: it was important to translate from Arabic into Latin, and then into the growing vernaculars of Europe. Much of what we know about the science and math of Classical Antiquity came via the scholars and writers of the Golden Age of Islamic Science, who first translated the works of Aristotle,  Plato, the mathematicians and engineers of Hellenistic civilization into Arabic. These were subsequently re-translated by European scholars.  An organization called Kalima (the Word), based in Abu Dhabi, is sponsoring an energetic program of translation into Arabic of books written in Western languages. Books on scientific topics are important in Kalima’s focus. Some classic works, such as Newton’s Principia Mathematica are on the list, but books by modern authors such as Freeman Dyson, Stephan Jay Gould, Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking are also scheduled. It’s a big job and it require some serious resources.
Kalima

Roy Tennant of UC Berkekey’s Library gleans important items from the professional press, summarizes their contents and passes the list on to  interested readers via his Current Cites newsletter. The latest issue of CC is particularly rich in materials that Scholars’ Space readers will want to consult.  The Library of Congress has released for comment a draft of the report of its Working Group on the Future of Bibliograhic Control. There is also a link to some interesting articles on the Functional Requirements for the Bibliographic Record (FRBR), which has been setting dove cotes atwitter in recent months, as well as to some studies on folksonomies and on who uses Institutional Repositories and who doesn’t. The folksonomy thing is the basis behind the tagging systems used on social networks such as de.li.ci.ous. I was hoping for one good summary article to clue me in, and I have have found it.  FRBR  has lot of promise, especially in an environment based on electronic networks. Some of it seems pretty blue-sky, but,  we should aim high.

http://lists.webjunction.org/currentcites/2007/cc07.18.11.html

Charles Bailey supplied this comment, which corrects some errors of fact in the original posting.  I’m attaching his message to the original text.  I thank Mr. Bailey for his attentive reading and I apologize for the mistakes:

Thanks for the posting about Current Cites. Two clarifications. Roy is now Senior Program Officer, RLG Programs, OCLC Programs and Research. Current Cites is written by a team of librarians (http://lists.webjunction.org/currentcites/team.html), including Roy (who is also the editor).