Looking at the Centre for Micro Finance's new MicroFinance E-Library, put together by CMF’s knowledge management team, made me feel ignorant and over confident. I had thought I was relatively well read about MF, but after examining the variety of case studies, academic papers and toolkits available on the site I have been humbled.
This is one of the most wonderful aspects of working in the microfinance sector. As an intervention aimed at poverty that has, in some cases, actually proven to be economically sustainable, it has caught the attention of some of the greatest social entrepreneurs, development economists and journalists working today. Thus there is a wonderfully thorough and readable literature on the subject (perhaps even more than it deserves! But this is for another post). For those who want to explore this literature, I believe that there is probably no better place to go than the E-Library, where the various documents have already been organized for you into easy to comprehend categories.*
The E-Library highlights all of the great articles and studies I have read, and many that I am eager to check out. Here is a list of articles I have read, available on the site, that I highly recommend you give a look, followed by another list of articles, also available at the E-Library, which I am most looking forward to taking a look at on one of those lonely nights.
Recommended:
- Group versus Individual Liability: A Field Experiment in the
- Does Microfinance Really Help? New Evidence from Flagship Programs in
- What’s Psychology Worth? A Field Experiment in the Consumer Credit Market
- Regulating Transformational Branchless Banking: Mobile Phones and Other Technology to Increase Access to Finance (Focus Note)
- How Do Microfinance Clients Understand their Loans?
Looking Forward to:
- How Rising Competition Among
- Reply to Jonathan Morduch’s “Does Microfinance Really Help the Poor?”
- Using Repayment Data to Test Across Models of Joint Liability Lending
- What do Microfinance Customers Value?
- Learning from failures in microfinance: what unsuccessful cases tell us about how group-based programs work
- Over-Borrowing and Competition: Are Credit Bureaus the Solution?
- The Transformation of Microfinance in
- New Directions in Development Economics: Theory or Empirics?: A Symposium in Economic and Political Weekly
*I do work for CMF, so please forgive me if this post makes me sound like too much of a company man!
4 comments:
Sir/Madm,
Am Pandu Ranga Swamy working as Library Associate in IFMR Library.
am very happy to read “The MF: E –Library: Be Humbled” your interest in development Library and Information Centers(LICs).
In this regard i will say that the following Open software’s are useful for your further development.
Digital/Electronic Library Softwares:
•DeSpace
DSpace is a digital library system to capture, store, index, preserve, and redistribute the intellectual output of a university’s research faculty in digital formats. Dspace has been developed jointly by MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard (HP). It is now freely available to research institutions world-wide as an open source system.
•Greenstone
Greenstone is a suite of software for building and distributing digital library collections. It provides a new way of organizing information and publishing it on the Internet or on CD-ROM. It is available for both Windows and Linux O/S. It requires Perl software to build collections.
•Eprints
EPrints is generic archive software under development by the University of Southampton. It is intended to create a highly configurable web-based archive. EPrints primary goal is to be set up as an open archive for research papers, but it could be easily used for other things such as images, research data, audio archives - anything that can be stored digitally by making changes in configuration. It works on Linux O/s and it needs MySQL, Perl modules and Apache webserver.
In India the above softwares are already some educational and research institutions are using for their institutional repository Collection Development, Management Organization, Acquiring, Storing, Distributing, and using information within institution or departments.
Thanks Pandu! This is an overwhelming amount of information to have access to. I will definitely take a look at DeSpace and the others.
Hi Don Kopf
Thanks for your replay.
i this comment i given DSpace accepts all manner of digital formats. Here are some examples:
Documents, such as articles, preprints, working papers, technical reports, or conference papers
Books
Theses
Data sets
Computer programs
Visualizations, simulations, and other models
Multimedia publications
Books
Bibliographic datasets
Images
Audio files
Video files
Learning objects
Web pages
Hi Don Kopf
Sorry for the mess in my earlier post. Some virus affected my Word processor garbling the message. Here is the correct one:
Thanks for your reply.
In this post,I want to stress that "DSpace" accepts a large number of digital formats. Here are some examples:
Documents, such as articles, preprints, working papers, technical reports, or conference papers
Books
Theses
Data sets
Computer programs
Visualizations, simulations, and other models
Multimedia publications
Books
Bibliographic datasets
Images
Audio files
Video files
Learning objects
Web pages
for more information, visit www.dspace.org
Thanks
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