Colleagues, I wish to commend Prof Shalini on the initiatives taken at the Mysore University with regard to modifications in the LIS curriculum. No degree is worth acquiring these days unless it responds/correlates to the market dynamics. So if the market demands LIS professionals with better communications skills and English language proficiency, so be it. You don't have much choice. If IIMs can teach communications skills at the post gradate level to their students, what is stopping the LIS schools in doing so? Why do we have to be like the politicians who publicly blast the English language, and then send their kids to English medium schools? Regards A Jose Librarian Indian Institute of Management Indore -----Original Message----- From: lis-forum-bounces@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in [mailto:lis-forum-bounces@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in]On Behalf Of Jayadev P Hiremath Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2005 2:33 PM To: lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in Subject: [LIS-Forum] Communication and presentation skills are not Englishlanguage centric, Classification and cataloguing......... Hi, Lot's of initiatives by Mysore University L & IS Department and others too. Though commendable, I am still unable to digest the fact that everything is terribly English centric. To begin with ...Communication skills and Presentation skills can be put into action in any language. You do not need mastery in English language to show off your competencies in Communication and Presentation skills. PowerPoint will certainly come in handy !! Mysore University is in Karnataka and the regional language is Kannada. There is a vast amount of Knowledge available in the regional language, thousands of books are published every year in Kannada. All the public and academic libraries in Karnataka, stock Kannada books. Old Kannada manuscripts are a source of history. Technical processing of these books is hampered due to lack of in-depth Kannada language skills of L & IS professionals . I would like to know what Mysore University L & IS is doing for the language of the land. Taking pride in producing Library Science graduates with all the English language, Communication, Presentation and IT skills and all the soft skiils sounds fantastic But does anybody think of the regional languages or the National language ? Doesn't Mysore University have to bother about this. Majority of the LIS teachers in India are fully concentrating on imparting knowledge directly relevant to L & IS sphere and they are the ones who need to be appreciated. English language, communication and presentation skills and other soft skills are secondary and need not be taught in a PG Course devoted to a specialized field. This would not only lead to diversion of limited resources but also affect the students who have just two years to learn about library and information science, gain a solid foundation and build their whole career upon it. All the softskills required for survival in the big bad world of WORKING can be picked up over a period of time or instantly from Training shops. With high unemployment rates there is no possiblity of Campus interviews or Job fairs during LIS Conferences. An essential skill for a freshly minted LIS graduate would be...... how to write a resume, how to hunt for a job and how to face an interview ? Does any LIS Department in India teach this ? Classification, Cataloguing and Indexing of Books : In India we keep reinventing the wheel. The same monograph is classified, catalogued and indexed in thousands libraries by thousands of professionals. It's high time this duplication of work comes to an end. The time, money and resources consumed by this task is phenomenal and can be put to better use in serving the customers. With the advent of library automation and internet penetration we can easily download the bibliographical details of monographs inclusive of call numbers and keywords from various WebPACs and integrate them into individual library's databases, may be after incorporating certain local variations. We are in the twenty first century and the days or original cataloging at individual library level are over, especially with respect to titles published in English. Copy cataloging should be embraced whole heartedly. With regards. Jayadev P Hiremath _______________________________________________ LIS-Forum mailing list LIS-Forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lis-forum ************************************************************** Scanned by eScan Anti-Virus and Content Security Software. Visit http://www.mwti.net for more info on eScan and MailScan. **************************************************************