Order of the Indian Empire
The Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire is an order of chivalry founded by Queen Victoria in 1878. The Order includes members of three classes: Knight Grand Commander Knight Commander Companion No appointments have been made since 1947, the year that India and Pakistan became independent from the British Raj. With the death of the last surviving knight, the Maharaja of Dhrangadhra, the order became dormant in 2010; the motto of the Order is Imperatricis auspiciis, a reference to Queen Victoria, the first Empress of India. The Order is the junior British order of chivalry associated with the British Indian Empire; the British founded the Order in 1878 to reward native officials who served in India. The Order had only one class, but expanded to comprise two classes in 1887; the British authorities intended the Order of the Indian Empire as a less exclusive version of the Order of the Star of India. On 15 February 1887, the Order of the Indian Empire formally became "The Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire" and was divided into two classes: Knights Commander and Companions, with the following first Knights Commander: General Sir Frederick Sleigh Roberts Edward Drummond Sir Alfred Comyns Lyall Bhagvat Singh Robert Anstruther Dalyell Maxwell Melvill Alexander Cunningham Rana Shankar Baksh Singh Dietrich Brandis Sir Monier Williams Pusapati Ananda Gajapati Raju, Maharaja of Vizianagram Donald Campbell Macnabb Nawab Munir ud-Daula Salar Jang, the Prime Minister of Hyderabad George Christopher Molesworth Birdwood Ranjit Singh, Raja of Ratlam Surgeon-General Benjamin Simpson Albert James Leppoc Cappel Sayyid Hassan Ali Khan Bahadur, Nawab of Murshidabad Lachmessur Singh, Maharaja of Darbhanga Sir Nawab Imam Buksh Khan Mazari Sir Nawab Bahram Khan Mazari Sir Parashuram Bhausaheb Patwardhan Rai Sahib Madan Mukund Shuja ul-Mulk, the Mehtar of Chitral Bapu Sahib Avar Donald Mackenzie Wallace Alfred Woodley Croft Bradford Leslie James Houssemayne Du Boulay Baba Sir Khem Singh Bedi, Spiritual Head of the SikhsHowever, on 21 June 1887, a further proclamation regarding the Order was made.
Seven Knights Grand Commander were created, namely: HRH The Prince of Wales HRH The Duke of Edinburgh HRH The Duke of Connaught and Strathearn HRH The Duke of Cambridge Lord Reay, Governor of Bombay Lord Connemara, Governor of Madras General Sir Frederick Sleigh Roberts Appointments to both Orders ceased after 14 August 1947. The Orders have never been formally abolished, as of 2012 Queen Elizabeth II remains the Sovereign of the Orders. There are no living members of the order; the last Grand Master of the Order was Rear Admiral The 1st Viscount Mountbatten of Burma, the last Viceroy of India. Lord Mountbatten was killed in an IRA bombing in County Sligo on 27 August 1979; the last surviving GCIE, H. H Maharaja Sri Sir Chithira Thirunal Balarama Varma, the Maharaja of Travancore, died on 19 July 1991 in Trivandrum; the last surviving KCIE, H. H Maharaja Sri Sir the Maharaja of Dhrangadhra, the Maharaja of Dhrangadhra-Halvad, died at Dhrangadhra on 1 August 2010; the last surviving CIE, Sir Ian Dixon Scott, died on 3 March 2002.
The fictional characters Purun Dass and Harry Paget Flashman each held a KCIE. The British Sovereign serves as the Sovereign of the Order; the Grand Master held the next-most senior rank. Members of the first class were known as "Knights Grand Commanders" rather than "Knights Grand Cross" so as not to offend the non-Christian Indians appointed to the Order. At the time of foundation in 1878 the order had only one class, that of Companion, with no quota imposed. In 1886, the Order was divided into the two classes of Knights Companions; the following year the class of Knight Grand Commander was added. The statute provided that it was "competent for Her Majesty, Her heirs and successors, at Her or their pleasure, to appoint any Princes of the Blood Royal, being descendants of His late Majesty King George the First, as Extra Knights Grand Commanders". By Letters Patent of 2 Aug 1886, the number of Knights Commander was increased to 82, while Commanders were limited to 20 nominations per year. Membership was expanded by Letters Patent of 10 June 1897, which permitted up to 32 Knights Grand Commander.
A special statute of 21 October 1902 permitted up to 92 Knights Commander, but continued to limit the number of nominations of Commanders to 20 in any successive year. On 21 December 1911, in connection with the Delhi Durbar, the limits were increased to 40 Knights Grand Commander, 120 Knights Commander, 40 nominations of companions in any successive year. British officials and soldiers were eligible for appointment, as were rulers of Indian Princely States; the rulers of the more important states were appointed Knights Grand Commanders of the Order of the Star of India, rather than of the Order of the Indian Empire. Women, save the princely rulers, were ineligible for appointment to the Order. Female princely rulers were admitted as "Knights" rather than as "Dames" or "Ladies". Other Asian and Middle Eas
A. V. Williams Jackson
Abraham Valentine Williams Jackson, L. H. D. Ph. D. LL. D. was an American specialist on Indo-European languages. He was born in New York City on February 9, 1862, he graduated from Columbia University in 1883. He was a fellow in letters there from 1883 to 1886, an instructor in Anglo-Saxon and the Iranian languages from 1887 to 1890. After study at the University of Halle from 1887 to 1889 he became an adjunct professor of English language and literature. In 1895, he was appointed public lecturer and appointed to the newly founded professorship of Indo-Iranian languages at Columbia University, where he remained until 1935, he was well known as a lecturer on the Orient. In 1901, during a visit to India and Ceylon, he received special attention from the Parsees, who presented to Columbia a valuable collection of Zoroastrian manuscripts in recognition of the instruction there given by him in their ancient texts. In 1903 he made a second journey to this time visiting Iran, he visited Central Asia sometime before 1918.
Jackson's grammar of Avestan, the language used in the Zoroastrian scriptures, is still considered to be the seminal work on the topic. Jackson was one of the directors of the American Oriental Society, he died on August 8, 1937. A Hymn of Zoroaster An Avesta Grammar in Comparison with Sanskrit An Avesta Reader Avesta, the Bible of Zoroaster Zoroaster, the Prophet of Ancient Iran Die iranische Religion Persia and Present Descriptive Catalogue of the Persian MSS. in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’ From Constantinople to the Home of Omar Khayyam A Descriptive Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts Presented to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by A. S. Cochran, with A. Yohannan Early Persian Poetry Jackson, A V Williams. A History of India.. Full text online at ibiblio.org He made many contributions to the Journal of the American Oriental Society. He edited the Columbia University Indo-Iranian Series. New General Catalog of Old Books and Authors This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Rines, George Edwin, ed..
"Jackson, Abraham Valentine Williams". Encyclopedia Americana; this article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Gilman, D. C.. "Jackson, Abraham Valentine Williams". New International Encyclopedia. New York: Dodd, Mead. Abraham Valentine Williams Jackson: biog and 4 source texts, on Vohuman. Org Works by A. V. Williams Jackson at LibriVox Works by or about A. V. Williams Jackson at Internet Archive
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
Integrated Authority File
The Integrated Authority File or GND is an international authority file for the organisation of personal names, subject headings and corporate bodies from catalogues. It is used for documentation in libraries and also by archives and museums; the GND is managed by the German National Library in cooperation with various regional library networks in German-speaking Europe and other partners. The GND falls under the Creative Commons Zero licence; the GND specification provides a hierarchy of high-level entities and sub-classes, useful in library classification, an approach to unambiguous identification of single elements. It comprises an ontology intended for knowledge representation in the semantic web, available in the RDF format; the Integrated Authority File became operational in April 2012 and integrates the content of the following authority files, which have since been discontinued: Name Authority File Corporate Bodies Authority File Subject Headings Authority File Uniform Title File of the Deutsches Musikarchiv At the time of its introduction on 5 April 2012, the GND held 9,493,860 files, including 2,650,000 personalised names.
There are seven main types of GND entities: LIBRIS Virtual International Authority File Information pages about the GND from the German National Library Search via OGND Bereitstellung des ersten GND-Grundbestandes DNB, 19 April 2012 From Authority Control to Linked Authority Data Presentation given by Reinhold Heuvelmann to the ALA MARC Formats Interest Group, June 2012
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
Oxford
Oxford is a university city in south central England and the county town of Oxfordshire. With a population of 155,000, it is the 52nd largest city in the United Kingdom, with one of the fastest growing populations in the UK, it remains the most ethnically diverse area in Oxfordshire county; the city is 51 miles from London, 61 miles from Bristol, 59 miles from Southampton, 57 miles from Birmingham and 24 miles from Reading. The city is known worldwide as the home of the University of Oxford, the oldest university in the English-speaking world. Buildings in Oxford demonstrate notable examples of every English architectural period since the late Saxon period. Oxford is known as a term coined by poet Matthew Arnold. Oxford has a broad economic base, its industries include motor manufacturing, publishing and a large number of information technology and science-based businesses, some being academic offshoots. Oxford was first settled in Anglo-Saxon times and was known as "Oxenaforda", meaning "ford of the oxen".
It began with the establishment of a river crossing for oxen around AD 900. In the 10th century, Oxford became an important military frontier town between the kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex and was on several occasions raided by Danes. In 1002, many Danes were killed in Oxford during the England-wide St. Brice's Day massacre, a killing of Danes ordered by King Æthelred the Unready; the skeletons of more than 30 suspected victims were unearthed in 2008 during the course of building work at St John's College. The ‘massacre’ was a contributing factor to King Sweyn I of Denmark’s invasion of England in 1003 and the sacking of Oxford by the Danes in 1004. Oxford was damaged during the Norman Invasion of 1066. Following the conquest, the town was assigned to a governor, Robert D'Oyly, who ordered the construction of Oxford Castle to confirm Norman authority over the area; the castle has never been used for military purposes and its remains survive to this day. D'Oyly set up a monastic community in the castle consisting of a chapel and living quarters for monks.
The community never grew large but it earned its place in history as one of Britain's oldest places of formal education. It was there that in 1139 Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his History of the Kings of Britain, a compilation of Arthurian legends. Additionally, there is evidence of Jews living in the city as early as 1141, during the 12th century the Jewish community is estimated to have numbered about 80–100; the city was besieged during The Anarchy in 1142. In 1191, a city charter stated in Latin, "Be it known to all those present and future that we, the citizens of Oxford of the Commune of the City and of the Merchant Guild have given, by this, our present charter, confirm the donation of the island of Midney with all those things pertaining to it, to the Church of St. Mary at Oseney and to the canons serving God in that place. Since, every year, at Michaelmas the said canons render half a mark of silver for their tenure at the time when we have ordered it as witnesses the legal deed of our ancestors which they made concerning the gift of this same island.
We have made this concession and confirmation in the Common council of the City and we have confirmed it with our common seal. These are those who have made this confirmation. Oxford's prestige was enhanced by its charter granted by King Henry II, granting its citizens the same privileges and exemptions as those enjoyed by the capital of the kingdom. Oxford's status as a liberty obtained from this period until the 19th century. A grandson of King John established Rewley Abbey for the Cistercian Order. Parliaments were held in the city during the 13th century; the Provisions of Oxford were instigated by a group of barons led by Simon de Montfort. Richard I of England and John, King of England the sons of Henry II of England, were both born at Beaumont Palace in Oxford, on 8 September 1157 and 24 December 1166 respectively. A plaque in Beaumont Street commemorates these events; the University of Oxford is first mentioned in 12th-century records. Of the hundreds of Aularian houses that sprang up across the city, only St Edmund Hall remains.
What put an end to the halls was the emergence of colleges. Oxford's earliest colleges were University College and Merton; these colleges were established at a time when Europeans were starting to translate the writings of Greek philosophers. These writings challenged European ideology, inspiring scientific discoveries and advancements in the arts, as society began to see itself in a new way; these colleges at Oxf
