Colorado State University Libraries go live with Relais

Relais International announced that the Colorado State University Libraries in Fort Collins, Colorado, have gone live with their implementation of Relais Enterprise. The library staff is using Relais to process lending requests. This is our first customer to use the new scanning and delivery interface for Widetek and Bookeye scanners.

Tech. Sector may lose 1,80,000 jobs in this year

From siliconindia news bureau
Washington: As many as 180,000 employees in IT and related areas will become jobless this year if the layoff announcements by companies are to maintain the current pace."At the current pace, the year-end total could reach 180,000, which would be the largest annual total since 2003, when technology firms announced 228,325 job cuts," says a report by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago.
Telecommunications, electronics and computer industry companies had cut 140,422 jobs through October 31 this year, says the report, adding that 69,654 tech-sector jobs had been cut in the third quarter of the year alone. The report did not include major layoffs announced since October 31 such as the 5,000 to 6,000 job cuts at Sun Microsystems. "The tech sector is simply the latest victim in this downturn that began last year with the collapse of the housing market, and quickly spread to the financial markets," chief executive John Challenger said in a statement. "Businesses and consumers have slashed their spending and no industry is immune," he added.The 180,000 job cuts in the tech sector would be the most since 2003 but would still be far fewer than the 695,581 jobs lost in 2001, with the bursting of the dot-com bubble. In 2007, a total of 107,295 tech-sector jobs were cut.

Obama makes history

WASHINGTON: Democrat Barack Obama captured the White House on Tuesday after an extraordinary two-year campaign, defeating Republican John McCain to make history as the first black to be elected US president. Obama will be sworn in as the 44th US president on January 20, 2009, television networks said. He will face a crush of immediate challenges, from tackling an economic crisis to ending the war in Iraq and striking a compromise on overhauling the health care system.

McCain saw his hopes for victory evaporate with losses in a string of key battleground states led by Ohio, the state that narrowly clinched President George W. Bush's re-election in 2004, and Virginia, a state that had not backed a Democrat since 1964. Obama led a Democratic electoral landslide that also expanded the party's majorities in both chambers of Congress and firmly repudiated eight years of Republican President George W. Bush's leadership. The win by Obama, son of a black father from Kenya and white mother from Kansas, marked a milestone in U.S. history. It came 45 years after the height of the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King. In a campaign dominated at the end by a flood of bad news on the economy, Obama's leadership and proposals on how to handle the crisis tipped the race in his favor. Exit polls showed six of every 10 voters listed the economy as the top issue. Tens of thousands of Obama supporters gathered in Chicago's Grant Park for an election night rally that had the air of a celebratory concert, cheering results that showed his victories in key states. McCain, a 72-year-old Arizona senator and former Vietnam War prisoner, had hoped to become the oldest president to begin a first term in the White House and see his running mate Sarah Palin become the first female U.S. vice president.