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Article about the Open Content Alliance
by manisha g 24 Nov '05

24 Nov '05

R/s Professionals Interesting article in San Francisco Chronicle about Brewster Kahle and the Open Content Alliance: "While Google has alienated authors and publishers with its plan to digitize books still in copyright, Kahle has moved gingerly, forging collaborations with Google's fiercest archrivals -- Microsoft and Yahoo -- to create a kinder, gentler digital library effort called the Open Content Alliance." Please have a look for Full Text via : http://tinyurl.com/apkdy Regards Manisha Gangurde Intern British Council Library Mumbai. --------------------------------- Yahoo! Music Unlimited - Access over 1 million songs. Try it free. R/s Professionals Interesting article in San Francisco Chronicle about Brewster Kahle and the Open Content Alliance: "While Google has alienated authors and publishers with its plan to digitize books still in copyright, Kahle has moved gingerly, forging collaborations with Google's fiercest archrivals -- Microsoft and Yahoo -- to create a kinder, gentler digital library effort called the Open Content Alliance." Please have a look for Full Text via : http://tinyurl.com/apkdy http://tinyurl.com/apkdy Regards Manisha Gangurde Intern British Council Library Mumbai. http://pa.yahoo.com/*http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=36035/*http://music.yahoo.c… Yahoo! Music Unlimited - Access over 1 million songs. Try it free.

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Indian President supports open access
by Subbiah Arunachalam 24 Nov '05

24 Nov '05

Indian president wants Indian libraries digitized and OA Prez calls for digitisation of libraries, Deccan Herald, November 22, 2005. (Thanks to LIS News.) Excerpt: President A P J Abdul Kalam wants all libraries in schools, colleges and universities to be digitised within the next four years. At the valedictory of Mahabharata Utsav, organised by the Mahabharata Research Foundation, here on Monday, the President said the digitisation of books has to be in regional languages. Knowledge has always been the prime mover for prosperity. It is important to take up the mission of integrating all forms of knowledge and culture into our digital library....The President unveiled a state-of-art Digital Mobile van to document, conserve, digitise and disseminate manuscripts. He suggested that the mobile digital library can become a partner of the Digital Library of India portal, a project aimed at providing free-to-read searchable collection of one million books. ---- One hopes that the heads of academic and research institutions and their librarians are listening! Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam]

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An open source dictionary of Swahili
by Subbiah Arunachalam 24 Nov '05

24 Nov '05

Friends inn Africa: I want to alert you to a dictionary of Swahili, Arun Open-source dictionary of Swahili Adrian Brune, Defining Moment For Swahili, Hartford Courant, November 20, 2005. (Thanks to Wired Campus.) Excerpt: With more than 80 million speakers in East and Central Africa, Swahili is the most widely spoken language in Africa, though a fully updated dictionary of the language has not been produced for 30 years. [Martin Benjamin, a visiting assistant professor of Swahili at Wesleyan University] aims to change that with the Kamusi (Dictionary) Project, an effort to document and produce a comprehensive guide to Swahili using the Internet....Benjamin compares his project to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia drafted largely by a band of worldwide literati. He emphasizes, however, that, unlike Wikipedia, he vets every entry for accuracy, sometimes within minutes, before he posts them....By spring 1995, Benjamin had entered 21,000 words into the database, and the Kamusi Project went live. It was one of Yale's first academic websites.

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UGC NET - LIS
by Saji S. Nair 23 Nov '05

23 Nov '05

Dear All, Dear All, These days, there is a sharp decline in the number of students clearing UGC NET for JRF/Lectureship in Library and Information Science. In many Universities, not even a single candidate is qualified in many occassions. Is this because of the lack of quality of LIS education in India OR UGC�s hard-line attitude towards this profession? It is a fact that job prospects our field, especially in the LIS teaching is not at all encouraging. In such a situation, Why UGC is enforcing strict rules to restrict the qualified candidates? Regards Saji Trivandrum Kerala Join Excite! - http://www.excite.com http://www.excite.com The most personalized portal on the Web!

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XXV All India IASLIC Conference at IIT Madras - reg
by Arunachalam Hariharan 23 Nov '05

23 Nov '05

IIT Madras is organising XXV All India Conference of the Indian Association of Special Libraries & Information Centres at the Central Library of IIT Madras Date: 26-29 December 2005 Organizers: Central Library, Indian Institute of Technology Madras & Indian Association of Special Libraries and Information Centres, Kolkata For more details, please visit http://www.cenlib.iitm.ac.in/iaslic2005/ For Registration for Conference, Accommodation, Sponsorships and any other matter bout IASLIC 2005, please contact: Dr. Harish Chandra Organising Secretary (IASLIC 2005) and Librarian, Central Library, Indian Institute of Technology Madras IIT Campus. Chennai-600 036 Tamil Nadu, INDIA E-mail: hchandra(a)iitm.ac.in Tel: 044-22574951 (Office) 044-22576951 (Residence) Mobile : +91 9444404951 www.harishchandra.net __________________________________ Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click. http://farechase.yahoo.com

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Position Announcement--Technical Support Analyst
by T.V. Prafulla Chandra 23 Nov '05

23 Nov '05

<color><param>0100,0100,0100</param>POSITION ANNOUNCEMENT </color>No.NES/HRD/TSA Dated November 22, 2005 <color><param>0100,0100,0100</param>NISC Export Services (NES) Private Limited (www.nisc.com) invites applications for positions of TECHNICAL SUPPORT ANALYST in its newly created Technical Support Department. NES and its affiliates together comprise one of the foremost database access, production and publishing companies in the world. NESs 100+ database products, published online (BiblioLine) or on CD-ROM (NISC DISCover), cover most areas of the universe of know- ledgearts & humanities, earth sciences, environment, social sciences, life sciences and technology. Based in Hyderabad, the successful candidate will handle, using latest information and communication technologies, queries pertaining to technical support received from customers all over the world. NES is looking for candidates who have at least a Masters degree in one of the following subjects: English, Mass Communication, Communication & Journalism or any related subject. · Good typing skills are required as the working environment involves online computer use for access to offices worldwide. · Familiarity with Internet browsing. · In addition, the candidates should possess the ability --to communicate in a formal, clear, empathetic and pleasant style, with excellent command of written and spoken English. --to handle a wide variety of modern communication media in a professional manner, conforming to standards of international business communication with respect to etiquette and pronunciation. --to understand and answer, with speed and accuracy, technical queries from customers. --to maintain good public relations with customers, both actual and potential. --to collect, organize, store and deliver information resources required for technical support. --to enjoy interactions with customers hailing from diverse national backgrounds and serve them in a most user-friendly manner. · If you are not a resident of Hyderabad and are willing to relocate, please indicate that at the top of your resume. Apart from on-job training inputs, NES provides a comfortable, pleasant and enjoyable work environment with bright career prospects and exciting opportunities to realize ones potentialities. Salary is commensurate with qualifications and experience. NES considers applications from candidates who had appeared for examinations and awaiting announcement of results. Please submit a letter of application, resume, and names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of three references to: The Managing Director NISC Export Services Co. Pvt. Ltd. 3rd Floor, Ballad Estates, St. Anns Road, Tarnaka Hyderabad 500 017 Email: hrd(a)nisc.co.in Phone: +91 40 27001517 Applications are accepted until the positions are filled. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NISC Export Services Pvt. Ltd. (an affiliate of NISC International, Inc. USA) S-1 Ballad Estates, St.Ann's School Road, Tarnaka, Hyderabad 500 017 Andhra Pradesh, India - Tel:+91 40 27001517 Tel/Fax:+91 40 27002538 WWW.NISC.COM A company in service to NISC worldwide. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: [LIS-Forum] Tempere archive - universal; what about OpenMED?
by Sukhdev Singh 23 Nov '05

23 Nov '05

Can I hope more people come forward -- especially people working in Medical/Biological Sciences/Pharmacological/Nursing and other allied sciences to come forward to further build - http://openmed.nic.in - OpenMED? We can then form a voluntary group to: 1. Educate our Institutional scientists / staff / administrators regarding Open Access - OA. 2. Instruct them how to self-archive their articles 3. Play editorial role in meta-data generation over http://openmed.nic.in 4. Answer their Frequently Asked Questions and clarify their doubts regarding Open Access and Self-Archiving. 5. Suggest authors various Open Access Journals as alternative to conventional journals - for publication of their articles. Should we all remain just spectators to the changing world of librarianship or ACT NOW? The time has come - just FIVE years to go. And Best of Luck for QMed. Hope it would play its role in next generation librarianship. --Sukhdev Singh, NIC. http://openmed.nic.in > Message: 4 > Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 11:22:07 +0530 > From: "Vasumathi Sriganesh" <vasu(a)qmedin.com> > Subject: Re: [LIS-Forum] Tempere archive - universal; what about > OpenMED? > To: <lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in> > Message-ID: <00fa01c5ef28$e13cb6b0$0300a8c0@laptop> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" > > Sukhdev > > As I told you earlier - I have done the beginnings........by talking about > and demo-ing OpenMED in all my training programs.I am ready to help - count > me in. > QMed is going to be "formally" a non-profit organization in whatever time it > takes me to formalize it - trying hard to make that VERY SOON. On principle > it already is. So NIC could definitely consider us. > I really like your line - we are not just Downloaders - we Upload too. I > will adopt that in my programs > > Vasumathi > > Vasumathi Sriganesh > Director, QMed Services > A-3, Shubham Centre, Cardinal Gracious Road > Chakala, Andheri East, Mumbai 400099, India > Ph: 91-22-28229223 Fax: 91-22-28224358 > Mobile: 91-98672-92230 > Email: vasu(a)qmedin.com, Web: www.qmedin.com > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Sukhdev Singh" <esukhdev(a)gmail.com> > To: <lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in> > Sent: Monday, November 21, 2005 12:43 PM > Subject: Re: [LIS-Forum] Tempere archive - universal; what about OpenMED? > > > ...........................Please let me know if any professional would like > to come forward to build OpenMED@NIC further? It is an opportunity to show > the world that > we can also build international quality archives. Let us show that we LIS > professionals from India are not just "Downloaders", we "Upload" too!!. > > Thanks, > Sukhdev Singh, NIC. > http://openmed.nic.in > > > >

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Prez calls for digitisation of libraries
by Jayadev P Hiremath 23 Nov '05

23 Nov '05

* Prez calls for digitisation of libraries * DH News Service Bangalore: * President A P J Abdul Kalam wants all libraries in schools, colleges and universities to be digitised within the next four years. * President A P J Abdul Kalam wants all libraries in schools, colleges and universities to be digitised within the next four years. At the valedictory of Mahabharata Utsav, organised by the Mahabharata Research Foundation, here on Monday, the President said the digitisation of books has to be in regional languages. Knowledge has always been the prime mover for prosperity. It is important to take up the mission of integrating all forms of knowledge and culture into our digital library. In the venture, we should ensure availability of fibre optic cables, satellite communication and wireless infrastructure, especially in remote areas. The President unveiled a state-of-art Digital Mobile van to document, conserve, digitise and disseminate manuscripts. <https://www.online.citibank.co.in/portal/citiinforms.jsp?form_id=frmAcquisi…> He suggested that the mobile digital library can become a partner of the Digital Library of India portal, a project aimed at providing free-to-read searchable collection of one million books. On the occasion, the president presented Jnanadoota Award to Prof K T Pandurangi and Mahabharata Ratna award to Late Bhima Bhat and Prof D H Dhadpale of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune. The award was given for excellence in Mahabharata and Indic systems. Also, Mahabharata Lakshalankara, a critical edition of 500-year-old commentary on Mahabharata, was released and a project to prepare an encyclopaedia of Mahabharata was launched. Prez calls for digitisation of libraries DH News Service Bangalore: President A P J Abdul Kalam wants all libraries in schools, colleges and universities to be digitised within the next four years. President A P J Abdul Kalam wants all libraries in schools, colleges and universities to be digitised within the next four years. At the valedictory of Mahabharata Utsav, organised by the Mahabharata Research Foundation, here on Monday, the President said the digitisation of books has to be in regional languages. Knowledge has always been the prime mover for prosperity. It is important to take up the mission of integrating all forms of knowledge and culture into our digital library. In the venture, we should ensure availability of fibre optic cables, satellite communication and wireless infrastructure, especially in remote areas. The President unveiled a state-of-art Digital Mobile van to document, conserve, digitise and disseminate manuscripts. https://www.online.citibank.co.in/portal/citiinforms.jsp?form_id=frmAcquisi… He suggested that the mobile digital library can become a partner of the Digital Library of India portal, a project aimed at providing free-to-read searchable collection of one million books. On the occasion, the president presented Jnanadoota Award to Prof K T Pandurangi and Mahabharata Ratna award to Late Bhima Bhat and Prof D H Dhadpale of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune. The award was given for excellence in Mahabharata and Indic systems. Also, Mahabharata Lakshalankara, a critical edition of 500-year-old commentary on Mahabharata, was released and a project to prepare an encyclopaedia of Mahabharata was launched.

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OA gaining momentum, but DC research lagging behind!
by Subbiah Arunachalam 23 Nov '05

23 Nov '05

Friends: The Library of Congress in Washington DC has taken the first step to create the World Digital Library. I give below two news items from Peter Suber's blog "Open Access News". Brewster Kahle is forging ahead with the Internet Archive. Carnegie-Mellon University and their partners in India (led by Balki of IISc) and China are moving forward with their Million Books Digital Library project. Google, Yahoo and MSN are involved in huge digitization projects. The potential of the new web technology is being realised at last. Led by MIT, Cambridge, many universities around the world (particularly in China and Japan, but not yet in India) are placing their course material in the public domain under the Open Course Ware programme. Many journals have embraced the open access model and more than 500 institutions have set up interoperable institutional open access archives. Institutions such as UNESCO, ICSU, and CODATA have come out strongly in favour of open access to information and data. Donor agencies such as the Wellcome Trust now insist that results of publicly funded research should be available via open access channels. These are excellent developments. Experts such as Stevan Harnad, Alma Swan, Peter Suber and Leslie Chan and legal luminaries such as Lawrence Lessig have written extensively about the great advantages of going OA. One wonders why many universities and research laboratories in the developing world are still not embracing the culture of open access. Best wishes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] ---- OA World Digital Library David A. Vise, World Digital Library Planned, Washington Post, November 22, 2005. Excerpt: The Library of Congress is launching a campaign today to create the World Digital Library, an online collection of rare books, manuscripts, maps, posters, stamps and other materials from its holdings and those of other national libraries that would be freely accessible for viewing by anyone, anywhere with Internet access. This is the most ambitious international effort ever undertaken to put precious items of artistic, historical, and literary significance on the Internet so that people can learn about other cultures without traveling further than the nearest computer, according to James H. Billington, head of the Library of Congress. Billington said his goal is to bring together materials from the United States and Europe with precious items from Islamic nations stretching from Indonesia through Central and West Africa, as well as important materials from collections in East and South Asia....Billington said he envisions the initiative as a public-private partnership. Yesterday, he said that the Library of Congress has accepted $3 million from Google Inc. as its first corporate contribution....During the past year, Google has digitized about 5,000 books from the Library of Congress as part of a pilot project to refine the techniques to make copies of fragile books without damaging them. In the next phase of the project, Billington said Google will digitize books and other materials from the Library of Congress Law Library....Brin and Billington said Google would only digitize materials from the Library of Congress that are in the public domain and therefore not subject to copyright protection. Brin said he will help raise additional private funds to finance the World Digital Library. Billington said the $3 million gift from Google will be used over the next few years to develop the details of the project and pay for global outreach. ---- LOC-Google press release on World Digital Library The Library of Congress and Google have issued a joint press release on the World Digital Library (November 22). Excerpt: Librarian of Congress James H. Billington and Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin announced today that Google is the first private-sector company to contribute to the Library's initiative to develop a plan to begin building a World Digital Library (WDL) for use by other libraries around the globe. The effort would be supported by funds from nonexclusive, public and private partnerships, of which Google is the first. The concept for the WDL came from a speech that Billington delivered to the newly established U.S. National Commission for UNESCO on June 6, 2005, at Georgetown University....In his speech, Billington proposed that public research institutions and libraries work with private funders to begin digitizing significant primary materials of different cultures from institutions across the globe. Billington said that the World Digital Library would bring together online rare and unique cultural materials held in U.S. and Western repositories with those of other great cultures such as those that lie beyond Europe and involve more than 1 billion people: Chinese East Asia, Indian South Asia and the worlds of Islam stretching from Indonesia through Central and West Asia to Africa. Google Inc. has agreed to donate $3 million as the first partner in this public-private initiative. Google Co-Founder and President of Technology Sergey Brin said, Google supports the World Digital Library because we share a common mission of making the world's information universally accessible and useful. To create a global digital library is a historic opportunity, and we support the Library of Congress in this effort....The content of the World Digital Library, like that of American Memory, will be primarily one-of-a-kind materials, including manuscript and multimedia materials of the particular culture....The Library and Google recently completed a yearlong cooperative digitization of about 5,000 books in the public domain. The pilot developed procedures for handling and tracking fragile material as well as developing specifications for high-quality scanned images. Google will continue its scanning efforts by digitizing works of historical value from the Library of Congress' Law Library. In making the announcement, Billington emphasized the little-known fact that more than one-half of the book collections of the Library of Congress are in languages other than English. Like the materials in American Memory, those in the World Digital Library will either be in the public domain or made available with special permission. A World Digital Library would make these collections available free of charge to anyone accessing the Internet, and it could well have the salutary effect of bringing people together by celebrating the depth and uniqueness of different cultures in a single global undertaking, said Billington. We are grateful for Google's contribution to this important initiative, and we will seek contributions from other private sector companies with an equally enlightened self-interest.

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SciDevNet on Tunis and OA
by Subbiah Arunachalam 23 Nov '05

23 Nov '05

Friends: Here is the editorial in SciDevNet dated 22 November 2005. It draws attention to an article on open access (in SciDevNet) by Leslie Chan, Barbara Kirsop and Subbiah Arunachalam, and a talk by economist Jeffrey Sachs. Best wishes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] ---- Access to ICTs: an issue of global equity Connecting to the Internet from the first WSIS meeting in Geneva David Dickson 14 November 2005 Political deadlock over Internet governance must not overshadow the practicalities of bringing information and communication technologies (ICTs) to the people who need them. When plans were first agreed in 2001 to hold a 'world summit' on ICTs, hopes were high that the event would trigger a new international consensus on how to apply these technologies to the needs of the world's poor. In particular, proponents of the meeting wanted to avoid ideological conflict, and focus on the practical issues needed to bridge what is widely described as the 'digital divide'. For largely political reasons, the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) was divided into two components. The first part, which took place in Geneva, Switzerland two years ago, ended in stalemate. Although the meeting endorsed two high-minded documents a 'Declaration of Principles' and an outline 'Plan of Action' attempts to put flesh on their bones were undermined by disagreement on a single issue, namely who should run the Internet (see The challenges of 'e-science'). Sadly, it seems increasingly likely that the same fate awaits the second phase of WSIS, which opens in Tunis, Tunisia, later this week. Once again, Internet governance is expected to block significant achievements on other fronts. There is growing international agreement that because of the Internet's power, the basic rules governing it should be similar to those applied to other international communications systems (such as the allocation of radio wavebands). This means creating new global mechanisms to make the rules both more transparent and more accountable. But some are resisting this pressure for change. The opponents are led by the US government, which is seeking to maintain the current system. Under this, the Internet's operation is controlled by a US organisation, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The only body to which this is responsible is the US Department of Commerce, and through this, the US Congress. Unless some miracle occurs over the next few days, the second part of WSIS will end in the same political deadlock as its predecessor. And if this happens, the attention generated by the dispute will overshadow the more pressing issue at stake in the WSIS discussions: how to find practical ways of achieving greater digital equity when gap between the promise of ICTs and what they are actually delivering is far wider than it should be. Legitimate disagreement Internet governance is clearly important. The United States is correct to identify Internet openness as a major asset. Openness lies at the root of the Internet's power to provide knowledge and information that can meet the needs of individuals in developed and developing countries alike. There is also good reason for concern about heavy-handed control of the Internet by international bureaucracy. SciDev.Net itself has direct experience of the impact this can have. Despite being a professional media organisation, we were denied press credentials for this week's WSIS meeting on the grounds that as an educational charity, we are a non-government organisation, and thus apparently ineligible to attend press conferences or use media facilities. More seriously, governments that perceive the Internet as a threat could attempt to limit its use for democratic debate. Any efforts to exert political control on content must be resisted. As Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the United Nations wrote in a recent article in the Washington Post, "To defend the Internet is to defend freedom itself". But it does not follow that the US understanding of what such freedom means, or of how it should be interpreted and imposed is the correct interpretation. Nor, as the International Telecommunications Union (the main sponsors of WSIS) has demonstrated does it require heavy-handed international bureaucracy. Various proposals have been put forward in recent months, most recently by the European Union. Many suggest setting up a relatively 'hands-off' international organisation that could provide a forum for discussing and resolving contentious issues about Internet governance, without interfering in its technical aspects. To reject these proposals in their totality for essentially ideological reasons which seems to be the current stance of the United States risks undermining international efforts to reach a reasonable agreement. Similarly, US opposition to the Kyoto protocol undermines the international fight against global warming. Hopefully the Tunis meeting will find a way out of this impasse. Bridging the equity divide But even if leaders reach an agreement on the governance issue this week, an important step towards creating greater global 'digital equity', it would not be enough to achieve this goal. An equally, if not more important need, is for practical efforts to put the promises of ICTs into effect. These promises are being increasingly recognised. In the scientific domain alone, they range from delivering the most recent research findings on obscure tropical diseases to isolated clinics, to the possibilities offered by 'open archiving' for making the world's scientific literature available to all at no charge (see our special feature Open Access Archiving: the fast track to building research capacity in developing countries). The need remains substantial. According to background documents being circulated by the WSIS organisers, less than three per cent of people in Africa used the Internet last year, compared to more than half of people in industrialised nations. And one relatively small European country, Denmark, had more than twice the international Internet bandwidth used by the whole of Latin America and the Caribbean combined. Speaking in London last week, the economist Jeffrey Sachs said the need to increase bandwidth was among the most urgent and potentially effective ways that the developed world could help developing nations dig their own way out of poverty. He described how a recent study by Carnegie Mellon University in the United States estimated that almost all the major cities in Africa could become fully 'wired' for a relatively modest investment, in terms of international budgets, of about US$1 billion. Sachs also announced a project of his own that plans to give 100 villages across Africa access to the Internet. Given that more than 400,000 African villages lack such access, this could be seen as little more than a drop in the ocean. But if it can demonstrate both the feasibility and value of such efforts as has been shown in India then hopefully it will inspire others to make the necessary investment. The main message of Sachs's talk was that ideologies should not prevent practical solutions being implemented. Nor should they stop funds being invested in solutions on a broad enough scale to make a significant impact on poverty throughout the developing world. This conclusion should not be lost on delegates at the WSIS meeting in Tunis. If there has been substantial progress during the two years since the first part of the meeting in Geneva, it has been primarily on the practical side. It would be a shame if progress towards narrowing the digital divide were to be frustrated by a lack of comparable progress on the political front.

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