Dear Sir/Madam, It was sad that a reputed institute like National Agri-Food Biotechnology Institute, an autonomous institute of the Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India advertised for an IT expert for librarian post. This move was rightly questioned by LIS professionals through LIS forum and other means of communications. But the issue is, across the globe the situation is no different. This is not an isolated case. Library Schools are shutting down in US, Canada and other parts of the world (See: The closing of American library schools: Problems and opportunities by Larry J. Ostler, Therrin C. Dahlin, J. D. Willardson). Since 1990s many of LIS schools have closed down in US and other parts of the world. Dr. Vasumathi Sriganesh in her post (See LIS Forum dated: 29th June 2012) rightly pointed out at the decline of interest or people attending the Annual Conference of the Medical Library Association The prestigious LIS Schools such as Indiana University’s School of Library and Information Science (SLIS), Royal School of Library and Information Science (RSLIS) and many other LIS schools in the recent past have joined the iSchool Caucus or renamed themselves as Information Schools (iSchools) (See http://www.ischools.org). LIS courses are more and more have becoming multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary in nature. Ostler, Dahlin, & Willardson in their book “The closing of American library schools: Problems and opportunities” discusses about two fundamental reasons why LIS Schools are declining in numbers: the reasons are lack of leadership in LIS community (void left by S.R. Ranganathan in Indian LIS community is still unfilled) and lack of theoretical underpinnings in LIS teaching and research. The relevancy of bibliographic classification in light of rapid development in digital technologies has also been in discussion. The FID (Federation for Information and Documentation, dissolved in 2002) once known for path breaking research in knowledge organization (UDC) now dissolved or consists only few members. The complexity of bibliographic classification systems in the post-Internet era have in a way dragged user towards simple and easy to use information retrieval tools like Google (See very interesting article on this issue by Birger Hjørland entitled “Is classification necessary after Google?” appeared in Journal of Documentation). The OCLC User Survey on College Students perceptions of Libraries & information Resources (See http://www.oclc.org/reports/pdfs/studentperceptions.pdf) and other similar studies have established that users are happy to use search engine like Google for retrieving information rather relying on bibliographic classification systems. The real threat that now looming large for LIS community is through Google Book Search (GBS). If Google digitize all the books available in libraries which Google has a tie up for digitization, who would visit the library? There is need to decrease the monopoly of third party information service providers such as Google to survive and have to find ways to decrease the users inclination towards search engines like Google by initiating similar products by library professionals. Robert Darnton of Harvard University in his recent book “The case for books: Past, present and future” talks about the need of international digital library to counter the monopoly of GBS. The advancement in digital technologies and availability of information through the Internet is becoming more and more, libraries and LIS course have been sidelined all over the world. One example is how many central universities established very recently in India have courses in LIS? Why there is such reluctancy to start LIS schools in many of the newly established central and state universities? Is this because information is easily found through Google? ------------------------- With best wishes Vasantha Raju N -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.