That mighty pantun river and its tributaries

Known as pantun to the Malays in Brunei, Malaysia, Pattani, Riau, Singapore, and Southern Phillipines, it is called peparikan to the Javanese, sesindiran to the Sundanese and many other different names in different ethnic groups in the different parts of the Indo-Malay world, which is made up of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Pattani in southern Thailand, and Mindanao in the southern Philippines. In almost every settlement that sprang up along the major rivers and tributaries in the Indo-Malay world, the pantun blend well with their natural and cultural surroundings. In this article, the geographical extent of the pantun family in the Indo-Malay world is likened to a mighty river that has a complex network of tributaries all over the Indo-Malay world. Within the Indo-Malay world, it is the movement of the peoples help the spread of pantun from one area to the other and makes it an art form of immensely rich and intricate as can be seen from the examples given

RAISING INTEREST IN MALAY CLASSIC LITERATURE IN YOUNG READERS

The interest in reading printed books has tapered off in this digital age as shownby reports of continual loss from many book publishers over the years. What todo to whet reading habits, especially among the young? What are the optionsin store in book publishing? What can publishing experts predict? What can wesay how to whet reading habit? We know that without reader, more publisherswill wind up their business. Thus, new ways and outlets have to search.Though Malay hikayat are considered important, they are not interesting. Tomake them interesting, relevant and acceptable to young readers, publishersmust recognize the twin purposes of instruction and delight that have longbeen accepted as the primary goals of books for children and the fact that theyare important and form a distinctive category of readers with separate needsand interests. Only by making the books interesting, relevant and acceptableto them, Malay hikayat can hope to live on. Though physically weak, they arespiritually, emotionally and imaginatively strong. Stories about animals, fantasyand legends are popular with them. They love the illustrated books, cartoons,comics, movies and others on Pak Pandir, Pak Belalang, Singapura DilanggarTodak, Puteri Gunung Ledang, Hang Tuah dan Hang Jebat. These stories arealso among the nest examples of moral tales that encourage them to focus onself-improvement like Aesop fables, stories from Grimn’s brothers. This meansthat integration of visual and verbal elements has remained a signi cant featureto attract children. In this paper, we argue that publishers must adapt storiesfrom Malay classical literature to illustrated books, movies, comics, movies, lmsand e-books. Linking the best visual and verbal elements in these publicationsis the way forward to teach literacy, history and moral to young readers

ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF IT ON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY SERVICES IN THE 21ST CENTURY

ABSTRACT University libraries in Malaysia, as elsewhere, are always in a constant state of change. The application of computers, the adoption of CD-ROM and other on-line databases, the emergence of multimedia technology and the expansion of the information highway following rapid developments in IT have made the working and information environment in these organisations very different from that before computerisation in the 1970s. These changes, under the impact of IT, have opened up new opportunities for libraries to improve their services in the decades ahead

Perpustakaan pemangkin peradaban di dunia barat dan Melayu : dulu, kini dan kelak / Ding Choo Ming

Rencana ini cuba memperkatakan peranan perpustakaan sebagai agen peningkatan peradaban dalam konteks perpustakaan bertindak sebagai pusat pembelajaran, manakala peradapan dalam konteks pembangunan dan kemajuan orang individu dan masyarakatnya. Memandangkan pentingnya perpustakaan sebagai pusat pembelajaran untuk membolehkan kita mendapat pelbagai maklumat dan ilmu, maka pemanfaatannya sudah menjadi tanggungjawab semua orang tanpa mengira perbezaan jantina, ras, usia, status, pendidikan dan lain-lain dalam membina dan meningkatkan kualiti hidup kita sendiri dan seterusnya peradapan. Sejak zaman dahulu lagi, pengejaran ilmu dan maklumat yang membawa kepada pemanfaatan ilmu dan maklumat di perpustakaan dengan berkesan itu telah merangsangkan penyelidikan yang seterusnya telah membawa kepada penemuan baru yang menjadi asas mempercepatkan pembangunan minda manusia yang selanjutnya merintis lorong baru kepada pembangunan ide baru selain menggalakkan penyelidikan baru ke atas sains dan teknologi. Kesemua itu bukan sahaja membawa kepada pembaharuan kesarjanaan, tetapijuga kemajuan terus menerus di segala bidang ilmu, yang kemajuannya adalah penggabungan kemajuan manusia secara lahiriah dan batiniah dalam konteks geo-politik yang baru dari masa ke masa. Memandangkan manusia tidak pernah berpuas hati, malah tidak pernah mengenal penat lelah dalam mengejar ilmu baru, maka penyimpanan ilmu lama dan kebijaksanaan daripada manusia masa lalu itu agar bukan sahaja tidak hilang, tetapijuga menyebarkannya dalam bentuk yang jauh lebih baik dan dengan lebih pantas itu sudah kekal menjadi kegiatan tetap perpustakaan yang masih dianggap sebagai pusat sosial dan pendidikan sehingga kini. Dari segi sejarah, kita tidak sahaja telah menyaksikan fajar baru kemanusiaan menyingsing di perpustakaan yang pada asalnya telah ditubuhkan di istana, rumah ibadat dan Tuhan (seperti masjid, gereja dan candi), tetapi juga pembangunan pelbagai perpustakaan dengan lebih gigih dan teratur di tempat lain, berikutan terciptanya alat cetak dan kini pemindahan minat kita kepada maklumat digital dan seterusnya pembangunan perpustakaan digital. Segalagalanya itu disebabkan pengumpulan dan pengongsian kebijaksanaan, pengetahuan dan maklumat di perpustakaan itu telah menghasilkan kuasa yang rasaksa untuk mendorong pembangunan sumbermanusia dan peningkatan peradapan yang kebanyakannya terbukti bermula daripada penyelidikan di perpustakaan, selain makmal dan hidup manusia turun temurun

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Retrospective evaluation of whole exome and genome mutation calls in 746 cancer samples

Funder: NCI U24CA211006Abstract: The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) curated consensus somatic mutation calls using whole exome sequencing (WES) and whole genome sequencing (WGS), respectively. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium, which aggregated whole genome sequencing data from 2,658 cancers across 38 tumour types, we compare WES and WGS side-by-side from 746 TCGA samples, finding that ~80% of mutations overlap in covered exonic regions. We estimate that low variant allele fraction (VAF < 15%) and clonal heterogeneity contribute up to 68% of private WGS mutations and 71% of private WES mutations. We observe that ~30% of private WGS mutations trace to mutations identified by a single variant caller in WES consensus efforts. WGS captures both ~50% more variation in exonic regions and un-observed mutations in loci with variable GC-content. Together, our analysis highlights technological divergences between two reproducible somatic variant detection efforts

Access to materials on Malay world studies from Leiden to Bangi: A model for information repackaging on the information superhighway

The aim of this paper is to outline the history of Dutch scholarship on the Malay World and to elaborate on reasons for developing a single-articlecollection at ATMA. Some 300 years ago, Dutch scholars embarked on creating the discipline of Malay studies, founding research institutes, producing journals and books, and developing library collections. Today, despite the revolution in information technology that has witnessed an explosive interest in full-text databases, databases on Malay World Studies are extremely rare. In view of this scarcity, we at ATMA have been prompted to develop a singlearticles- collection aimed primarily at meeting the growing needs of researchers for a full-text service. This represents a paradigm shift from the conventional blanket collection development practised in libraries throughout the worl

The Malaysian Baba pantun database

It is interesting to note that baba nyonya in the Straits Settlements managed to develop a body of literature using Romanized Malay by the end of the 1890s. In doing so, they independently started a Sino-Malay literary movement, a few years after their cousins in Java had done the same thing. This paper introduces the Baba Pantun database, comprising 11,204 pantuns, syairs and dondang sayang written and published by them in 35 books and newspapers from 1899 to 1940

Indexing databases on Malay world studies: The critical role of knowledge workers

The construction of databases and the designing search engines and interfaces are no longer the monopoly of major online services or database publishers. Harnessing the power of such technology, ATMA has been constructing in-house databases on Malay world studies since April 1999, following the example of major online databases in offering scholars and researchers a collection of materials that can meet their needs. We now have three fully functioning databases, namely Single Articles on Malay World Studies, Malay Proverbs and Pantun, Syair and Dondang Sayang of Malaysian Baba. All of them are accessible at http://www.atma.ukm.my. Now, scholars of the Malay World from all over the world are able to enjoy customised information and document retrieval for the first time. With the search process being increasingly carried out by the end-users themselves, the efficiency, precision and relevance of search results become a major question. Simplicity and quality become necessary to a database’s survival. However, online searches can stumble on the simplest of obstacles: the connection suddenly breaks, the log-in procedure changed, the password invalid, the search statement too long, the manual does not give the help one needs, or the lack of certain search fields leaves users helpless, etc. These problems accumulate and complicate matters when several online systems are accessed simultaneously. Since errors can occur at each stage in database building, thus, dedication, care, institutional support and many other critical factors are vital if information workers are to perform well, and if they are to deliver services satisfactoril