National Library of Latvia
The National Library of Latvia known as Castle of Light is a national cultural institution under the supervision of the Ministry of Culture of Latvia. The National Library of Latvia was formed in 1919 after the independent Republic of Latvia was proclaimed in 1918; the first supervisor of the Library was Jānis Misiņš, a librarian and the founder of the Latvian scientific bibliography. Today the Library plays an important role in the development of Latvia's information society, providing Internet access to residents and supporting research and lifelong education; the National Library was founded on 29 August 1919, one year after independence, as the State Library. Its first chief librarian and bibliographer was Jānis Misiņš who made his immense private collection the basis of the new library. Within a year, until 1920, the stocks had grown to 250,000 volumes. Starting in the same year, all publishers were obliged to hand in a deposit copy of their works. Since 1927, the Library has published the National Bibliography of Latvia.
There were significant additions in 1939 and 1940, when the State Library took over many of the libraries and collections of the Baltic Germans, most of whom resettled to the Reich. Among these was a large part of the collection of the Society for History and Archaeology of Russia's Baltic Provinces, est. 1834, the primary historical society of the Baltic Germans. In 1940, holdings encompassed 1.7 million volumes, so that they had to be stored in two different locations in the Old Town. During the German occupation of Riga, the State Library was renamed Country Library, eliminating reference to a sovereign Latvian state). Under Soviet rule, it was known as State Library of the Latvian SSR. According to Soviet customs, in 1966 it received an honorary name, commemorating Vilis Lācis, a writer and the late prime minister of Soviet Latvia. From 1946, literature deemed'dangerous' from the Soviet perspective was withdrawn from the shelves and could be accessed only with a special permit until 1988.
In 1956, the State Library moved into its new building at Krišjāņa Barona iela. Since the reestablishment of national independence 1991, the institution has been called National Library of Latvia. In 1995, it received as a permanent loan the Baltic Central Library of Otto Bong, a collection pertaining to the history, regional studies and languages of the Baltic countries. In 2006, the National Library joined the European Library online service; the Library's holdings today encompass more than 5 million titles, incl. about 18,000 manuscripts from the 14th century up to modern times. One of the characteristic cornerstones of the NLL, which characterizes every national library, is the formation of the collection of national literature, its eternal storage and long-term access; the NLL is a centre of theoretical research and practical analyses of the activities of Latvian libraries. The Library carries out the functions of the centre of Latvia Interlibrary Loan, ensures the library and information service to the Parliament of the Republic of Latvia – the Saeima, implements the standardisation of the branch.
Since the outset, its main concern has been the national bibliography. The massive union catalogue Seniespiedumi latviešu valodā received the Spīdola Prize in 2000 and was awarded The Beautiful Book of the Year 99. In 2005, the Letonikas grāmatu autoru rādītājs was published, providing information about versatile branches of science and representatives of various nations, Latvia being the main focus of their publications; the NLL includes several collections of posters. Digitising collections at the NLL started in 1999. At present the Latvian National Digital Library Letonica, formed in 2006, holds digitized collections of newspapers, maps, sheet-music and audio recordings. In 2008 NLL launched two major digital projects. Periodika.lv is the NLL's collection of digitized historical periodicals in Latvian with the possibility to read full texts and search page by page. Latvia has Dance Festivals organized every four years; the historical materials from the first Song Festival in 1864 till the Latgale Song Festival in 1940 can be explored in another digital collection of the National Library of Latvia.
The first discussions about the need for a new National Library had started in 1928, the significance of the project of this century was further confirmed by the high-level international recognition. In 1999 all 170 UNESCO member states during its General Conference adopted a resolution, calling the member states and the international community to ensure all possible support for the implementation of the NLL project; the continuous growth of the Library had made it necessary to transfer parts of the stocks into other buildings. Thus, in 2013, NLL was distributed between five locations in Riga. Furthermore, some stocks were being stored since 1998 in a depot in Silakrogs outside the capital; these inconveniences convinced the Parliament to approve a new building on the left bank of the Daugava. On 15 May 2008, after discussions lasting for many years, the state agency Three New Brothers and the Union of National Construction Companies signed the contract on the construction of the new National Library of Latvia.
On 18 May 2014, the main facility of the Library at Krišjāņa Barona iela was close
Novelist
A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though novelists write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living writing novels and other fiction, while others aspire to support themselves in this way or write as an avocation. Most novelists struggle to get their debut novel published, but once published they continue to be published, although few become literary celebrities, thus gaining prestige or a considerable income from their work. Novelists come from a variety of backgrounds and social classes, this shapes the content of their works. Public reception of a novelist's work, the literary criticism commenting on it, the novelists' incorporation of their own experiences into works and characters can lead to the author's personal life and identity being associated with a novel's fictional content. For this reason, the environment within which a novelist works and the reception of their novels by both the public and publishers can be influenced by their demographics or identity.
Some novelists have creative identities derived from their focus on different genres of fiction, such as crime, romance or historical novels. While many novelists compose fiction to satisfy personal desires and commentators ascribe a particular social responsibility or role to novel writers. Many authors use such moral imperatives to justify different approaches to novel writing, including activism or different approaches to representing reality "truthfully". Novelist is a term derivative from the term "novel" describing the "writer of novels"; the Oxford English Dictionary recognizes other definitions of novelist, first appearing in the 16th and 17th centuries to refer to either "An innovator. However, the OED attributes the primary contemporary meaning of "a writer of novels" as first appearing in the 1633 book "East-India Colation" by C. Farewell citing the passage "It beeing a pleasant observation to note the order of their Coaches and Carriages.. As if it had bin the spoyles of a Tryumph leading Captive, or a preparation to some sad Execution" According to the Google Ngrams, the term novelist first appears in the Google Books database in 1521.
The difference between professional and amateur novelists is the author's ability to publish. Many people take up novel writing as a hobby, but the difficulties of completing large scale fictional works of quality prevent the completion of novels. Once authors have completed a novel, they will try to get it published; the publishing industry requires novels to have accessible profitable markets, thus many novelists will self-publish to circumvent the editorial control of publishers. Self-publishing has long been an option for writers, with vanity presses printing bound books for a fee paid by the writer. In these settings, unlike the more traditional publishing industry, activities reserved for a publishing house, like the distribution and promotion of the book, become the author's responsibility; the rise of the Internet and electronic books has made self publishing far less expensive and a realistic way for authors to realize income. Novelists apply a number of different methods to writing their novels, relying on a variety of approaches to inspire creativity.
Some communities encourage amateurs to practice writing novels to develop these unique practices, that vary from author to author. For example, the internet-based group, National Novel Writing Month, encourages people to write 50,000-word novels in the month of November, to give novelists practice completing such works. In the 2010 event, over 200,000 people took part – writing a total of over 2.8 billion words. Novelists don't publish their first novels until in life. However, many novelists begin writing at a young age. For example, Iain Banks began writing at eleven, at sixteen completed his first novel, "The Hungarian Lift-Jet", about international arms dealers, "in pencil in a larger-than-foolscap log book". However, he was thirty before he published his first novel, the controversial The Wasp Factory in 1984; the success of this novel enabled Banks to become a full-time novelist. An important writers' juvenilia if not published, is prized by scholars because it provides insight into an author's biography and approach to writing.
Novelists publish as early as their teens. For example, Patrick O'Brian published his first novel, Caesar: The Life Story of a Panda-Leopard, at the age of 15, which brought him considerable critical attention. Barbara Newhall Follett's The House Without Windows, was accepted and published in 1927 when she was 13 by the Knopf publishing house and earned critical acclaim from the New York Times, the Saturday Review, H. L. Mencken; these works will achieve popular success as well. For example, though Christopher Paolini's Eragon, was not a great critical success, but its popularity among readers placed it on the New York Times Children's Books Best Seller list for 121 weeks. First-time novelists of any age find themselves unable to get works published, because of a number of reasons reflecting the inexperience of the author and the economic realities of publishers. Authors mus
Virtual International Authority File
The Virtual International Authority File is an international authority file. It is a joint project of several national libraries and operated by the Online Computer Library Center. Discussion about having a common international authority started in the late 1990s. After a series of failed attempts to come up with a unique common authority file, the new idea was to link existing national authorities; this would present all the benefits of a common file without requiring a large investment of time and expense in the process. The project was initiated by the US Library of Congress, the German National Library and the OCLC on August 6, 2003; the Bibliothèque nationale de France joined the project on October 5, 2007. The project transitioned to being a service of the OCLC on April 4, 2012; the aim is to link the national authority files to a single virtual authority file. In this file, identical records from the different data sets are linked together. A VIAF record receives a standard data number, contains the primary "see" and "see also" records from the original records, refers to the original authority records.
The data are available for research and data exchange and sharing. Reciprocal updating uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting protocol; the file numbers are being added to Wikipedia biographical articles and are incorporated into Wikidata. VIAF's clustering algorithm is run every month; as more data are added from participating libraries, clusters of authority records may coalesce or split, leading to some fluctuation in the VIAF identifier of certain authority records. Authority control Faceted Application of Subject Terminology Integrated Authority File International Standard Authority Data Number International Standard Name Identifier Wikipedia's authority control template for articles Official website VIAF at OCLC
Bibsys
BIBSYS is an administrative agency set up and organized by the Ministry of Education and Research in Norway. They are a service provider, focusing on the exchange and retrieval of data pertaining to research and learning – metadata related to library resources. BIBSYS are collaborating with all Norwegian universities and university colleges as well as research institutions and the National Library of Norway. Bibsys is formally organized as a unit at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, located in Trondheim, Norway; the board of directors is appointed by Norwegian Ministry of Research. BIBSYS offer researchers and others an easy access to library resources by providing the unified search service Oria.no and other library services. They deliver integrated products for the internal operation for research and special libraries as well as open educational resources; as a DataCite member BIBSYS act as a national DataCite representative in Norway and thereby allow all of Norway's higher education and research institutions to use DOI on their research data.
All their products and services are developed in cooperation with their member institutions. BIBSYS began in 1972 as a collaborative project between the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters Library, the Norwegian Institute of Technology Library and the Computer Centre at the Norwegian Institute of Technology; the purpose of the project was to automate internal library routines. Since 1972 Bibsys has evolved from a library system supplier for two libraries in Trondheim, to developing and operating a national library system for Norwegian research and special libraries; the target group has expanded to include the customers of research and special libraries, by providing them easy access to library resources. BIBSYS is a public administrative agency answerable to the Ministry of Education and Research, administratively organised as a unit at NTNU. In addition to BIBSYS Library System, the product portfolio consists of BISBYS Ask, BIBSYS Brage, BIBSYS Galleri and BIBSYS Tyr. All operation of applications and databases is performed centrally by BIBSYS.
BIBSYS offer a range of services, both in connection with their products and separate services independent of the products they supply. Open access in Norway Om Bibsys
Système universitaire de documentation
The système universitaire de documentation or SUDOC is a system used by the libraries of French universities and higher education establishments to identify and manage the documents in their possession. The catalog, which contains more than 10 million references, allows students and researcher to search for bibliographical and location information in over 3,400 documentation centers, it is maintained by the Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education. Official website
Juvenile delinquency
Juvenile delinquency known as "juvenile offending", is the act of participating in unlawful behavior as minors. Most legal systems prescribe specific procedures for dealing with juveniles, such as juvenile detention centers and courts, with it being common that juvenile systems are treated as civil cases instead of criminal, or a hybrid thereof to avoid certain requirements required for criminal cases. A juvenile delinquent in the United States is a person, below 18 years of age and commits an act that otherwise would have been charged as a crime if they were an adult. Depending on the type and severity of the offense committed, it is possible for people under 18 to be charged and treated as adults. In recent years a higher proportion of youth have experienced arrests by their early 20s than in the past; some scholars have concluded that this may reflect more aggressive criminal justice and zero-tolerance policies rather than changes in youth behavior. Juvenile crimes can range to property crimes and violent crimes.
Youth violence rates in the United States have dropped to 12% of peak rates in 1993 according to official US government statistics, suggesting that most juvenile offending is non-violent. However, juvenile offending can be considered to be normative adolescent behavior; this is because most teens tend to offend by committing non-violent crimes, only once or a few times, only during adolescence. Repeated and/or violent offending is to lead to and more violent offenses; when this happens, the offender displays antisocial behavior before reaching adolescence. Juvenile delinquency, or offending, is separated into three categories: delinquency, crimes committed by minors, which are dealt with by the juvenile courts and justice system. According to the developmental research of Moffitt, there are two different types of offenders that emerge in adolescence. One is the repeat offender, referred to as the life-course-persistent offender, who begins offending or showing antisocial/aggressive behavior in adolescence and continues into adulthood.
Considering that most teenagers tend to show some form of antisocial or delinquent behavior during adolescence, it is important to account for these behaviors in childhood in order to determine whether they will be life-course-persistent offenders or adolescence-limited offenders. Although adolescence-limited offenders tend to drop all criminal activity once they enter adulthood and show less pathology than life-course-persistent offenders, they still show more mental health, substance abuse, financial problems, both in adolescence and adulthood, than those who were never delinquent; the two largest predictors of juvenile delinquency are: parenting style, with the two styles most to predict delinquency being:"permissive" parenting, characterized by a lack of consequence-based discipline and encompassing two subtypes known as:"neglectful" parenting, characterized by a lack of monitoring and thus of knowledge of the child's activities. Other factors that may lead a teenager into juvenile delinquency include poor or low socioeconomic status, poor school readiness/performance and/or failure, peer rejection, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
There may be biological factors, such as high levels of serotonin, giving them a difficult temper and poor self-regulation, a lower resting heart rate, which may lead to fearlessness. Delinquent activity the involvement in youth gangs, may be caused by a desire for protection against violence or financial hardship, as the offenders view delinquent activity as a means of surrounding themselves with resources to protect against these threats. Most of these influences tend to be caused by a mix of both environmental factors; some research indicates that changes in the weather can increase the likelihood of children exhibiting deviant behavior. Individual psychological or behavioral risk factors that may make offending more include low intelligence, impulsiveness or the inability to delay gratification, lack of empathy, restlessness. Other risk factors that may be evident during childhood and adolescence include, aggressive or troublesome behavior, language delays or impairments, lack of emotional control, cruelty to animals.
Children with low intelligence are more to do badly in school. This may increase the chances of offending because low educational attainment, a low attachment to school, low educational aspirations are all risk factors for offending in themselves. Children who perform poorly at school are more to be truant, the status offense of truancy is linked to further offending. Impulsiveness is seen by some as the key aspect of a child's personality that p
Saint
A saint is a person, recognized as having an exceptional degree of holiness or likeness or closeness to God. However, the use of the term "saint" depends on the denomination. In Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Lutheran doctrine, all of their faithful deceased in Heaven are considered to be saints, but some are considered worthy of greater honor or emulation. While the English word saint originated in Christianity, historians of religion now use the appellation "in a more general way to refer to the state of special holiness that many religions attribute to certain people", with the Jewish tzadik, the Islamic walī, the Hindu rishi or Sikh guru, the Buddhist arhat or bodhisattva being referred to as saints. Depending on the religion, saints are recognized either by official ecclesiastical declaration, as in the Catholic faith, or by popular acclamation; the English word "saint" comes from the Latin "sanctus". The word translated in Greek is "ἅγιος", which means "holy"; the word ἅγιος appears 229 times in the Greek New Testament, its English translation 60 times in the corresponding text of the King James Version of the Bible.
The word sanctus was a technical one in ancient Roman religion, but due to its "globalized" use in Christianity the modern word "saint" in English and its equivalent in Romance languages is now used as a translation of comparable terms for persons "worthy of veneration for their holiness or sanctity" in other religions. Many religions use similar concepts to venerate persons worthy of some honor. Author John A. Coleman S. J. of the Graduate Theological Union, California wrote that saints across various cultures and religions have the following family resemblances: exemplary model extraordinary teacher wonder worker or source of benevolent power intercessor a life refusing material attachments or comforts possession of a special and revelatory relation to the holy. The anthropologist Lawrence Babb in an article about Sathya Sai Baba asks the question "Who is a saint?", responds by saying that in the symbolic infrastructure of some religions, there is the image of a certain extraordinary spiritual king's "miraculous powers", to whom a certain moral presence is attributed.
These saintly figures, he asserts, are "the focal points of spiritual force-fields". They exert "powerful attractive influence on followers but touch the inner lives of others in transforming ways as well". According to the Catholic Church, a "saint" is anyone in Heaven, whether recognized on Earth or not, who form the "great cloud of witnesses"; these "may include our own mothers, grandmothers or other loved ones" who may have not always lived perfect lives but "amid their faults and failings they kept moving forward and proved pleasing to the Lord". The title "Saint" denotes a person, formally canonized, authoritatively declared a saint, by the Church as holder of the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, is therefore believed to be in Heaven by the grace of God. There are many persons that the Church believes to be in Heaven who have not been formally canonized and who are otherwise titled "saints" because of the fame of their holiness. Sometimes the word "saint" denotes living Christians. In his book Saint of the Day, editor Leonard Foley, OFM says this: the " surrender to God's love was so generous an approach to the total surrender of Jesus that the Church recognizes them as heroes and heroines worthy to be held up for our inspiration.
They remind us that the Church is holy, can never stop being holy and is called to show the holiness of God by living the life of Christ."The Catholic Church teaches that it does not "make" or "create" saints, but rather recognizes them. Proofs of heroicity required in the process of beatification will serve to illustrate in detail the general principles exposed above upon proof of their "holiness" or likeness to God. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church Chapter 2, Article 1, 61, "The patriarchs and certain other Old Testament figures have been and always will be honored as saints in all the church's liturgical traditions." On 3 January 993, Pope John XV became the first pope to proclaim a person a "saint" from outside the diocese of Rome: on the petition of the German ruler, he had canonized Bishop Ulrich of Augsburg. Before that time, the popular "cults", or venerations, of saints had been local and spontaneous and were confirmed by the local bishop. Pope John XVIII subsequently permitted a cult of five Polish martyrs.
Pope Benedict VIII declared the Armenian hermit Symeon to be a saint, but it was not until the pontificate of Pope Innocent III that the Popes reserved to themselves the exclusive authority to canonize saints, so that local bishops needed the confirmation of the Pope. Walter of Pontoise was the last person in Western Europe to be canonized by an authority other than the Pope: Hugh de Boves, the Archbishop of Rouen, canonized him in 1153. Thenceforth a decree of Pope Alexander III in 1170 reserved the prerogative of canonization to the Pope, insofar as the Latin Church was concerned. One source claims that "there are over 10,000 named saints and beatified people from history, the Roman Martyrology and Orthodox sources, but no definitive head count". Alban Butler published Lives of the Saints including a total of 1,486 saints; the latest revision of this book, edited by the Jesuit Herbert Thurston and the British author Donald Attwater, contains the lives of 2,565 saints. Monsign
