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The development of new sources of electrical energy is always at the forefront of scientific research -for example, urine-powered batteries [1]. The use of batteries and/or cells in school is also often cited in published work to promote interest in science (see 'Rough science and homemade batteries' [2]). Indeed, what follows here is not new (see Siemsen et al [3]). However, this article describes an improved fabrication process that can be carried out more easily in schools and provides guidance on the development of investigative work using the cells.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to discuss the various issues involved in Indian languages computing, particularly Telugu, like creating, displaying, searching and retrieving digital content. The paper also aims to emphasize the issues involved in retrieval in Indian languages. The complexities presented by the grammar, syntax and morphology of Indian languages are discussed.Design/methodology/approachThe paper undertakes and presents descriptive study of the issues and challenges in Indian languages computing in general and Telugu language in particular.FindingsThe problem of multilingual information retrieval in Indian languages is multi‐pronged. A major observation of this study is that, though digital content is available in Indian languages, it is mostly in non‐standard encoding format and fonts. There is an urgent need to work in the area of developing search algorithms for Indian languages, like soundex and metaphones to tolerate spelling variations and mistakes that a user might make in queries and suggest correct spelling(s).Practical implicationsWith existing technologies libraries can now build online catalogues in the language of the documents or build digital repositories with content in various Indian languages. Though a few library automation software like NewGenLib and digital library software like DSpace, etc. are offering Unicode support for Indian languages, they do not allow for different types of search such as truncation search, word variants, etc. The present study is a step towards developing algorithms for indexing and searching in Indian languages.Originality/valueThe paper addresses various issues in Indian language computing with emphasis on search and retrieval.

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Open Access (OA) to scholarly information has now become a reality. Due to the efforts of OA supporters worldwide now even commercial publishers have started supporting open access to their content through various open access models. Many public institutions like universities and R&D Labs have realized the importance of OA in developing the society in general. As a result, these institutions have come up with OA repositories, archives and libraries. As with any such proliferation of information, OA resources have increased manifold and can easily overwhelm even an experienced user. Also different repositories may use various digital library software, which presents the problem of multifarious search interfaces and features. The solution can be found in the open community of open source software and open standards. The open source metadata harvesting software PKP-OHS and the open protocol for metadata harvesting i.e. OAI-PMH come to the rescue. This chapter discusses how PKP-OHS was implemented as a pilot study at the Central University of Himachal Pradesh (CUHP).