Interlinking Of Libraries
Educational institutions in a region should work towards interlinking their libraries to enable their services getting extended beyond students and teachers, S. Ravichandra Reddy, Director (in-charge), National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC), Bangalore, said here on Friday.Inaugurating a national conference on “Rebuilding the Libraries” at the Kumaraguru College of Technology (KCT), he said the NAAC approval committee would consider the quality of libraries when it visited colleges for providing accreditation. “The number of volumes and the number of users too will be taken into consideration for accreditation.” “A library reflects the quality of the institution. They should be of relevance to society and should adopt a learner-centric approach. Librarians should take care to introduce digital facilities. Library system managers will have to develop suitable mechanisms to enable the end user attain maximum benefit from the library,” Mr. Reddy asserted.
N. Mahalingam, Chairman, Sakthi Group, said the texture and content of libraries had undergone vast changes. “Role of libraries is not what they used to be. We have wonderful accessibility to huge volumes of scientific and factual information at our finger tips through good networks. Smart cards, bio-metric applications, e-journals, e-resources, digital preservations, institutional repositories, on-line journalism, etc., are some of the recent development,” he added.
He appreciated the efforts of Society for the Advancement of Library and Information Science (SALIS), a national association of libraries, which has rendered good service in the area of technology upgrading in libraries and also promoting libraries as academic departments. KCT Correspondent M. Balasubramaniam, Vice-Chairman K. Arumugam and Principal Joseph V. Thanikal, and Director of SALIS A. Hariharan spoke.
