Dear Professionals, We keep seeing such kind of postings through Lis-forum and other channels calling for Book Chapters. While I don't wish to make any comment about this sort efforts by individuals making call for book chapters for their own reason, I definitely urge LIS teachers and professionals at national/institutional/departmental level to take an initiative to publish OA texts books with the help of knowledgeable/experts in various subjects. While there could be editorial teams, authors can get credit for individual chapters. There should be revisions / new edtions and new books time to time depending upon new developments. We should also request other discipline authors like Computer Science, Statistics, Management, etc to contribute chapters useful for LIS syllabus depending upon the need. This sort of efforts could be supported by UGC. The OA books could be hosted on a server either maintained by some agency or a cloud supported by UGC and the content should be searchable and full text accessible in line with those of commercial publishers. The main reason for appeal is mainly due to the fact that not many E-Books useful for LIS are available even from commercial publishers. Even if there are, most of them are Conference Proceedings and not the Text Books. Few publishers like McGraw Hill and Pearson do make available text books, but their licensing conditions are beyond purchasing power of even some rich universities. INFLIBNET has already started e-patashala, a very good initiative covering all subjects. Our attempts should be complementary/supplimentary to INFLIBNET's initiative. We LIS personnels are leaders for digitisation, OA,and DL initiatives. If we put our efforts, definitely we can come out with some way of achieving this goal. We can even think of using electronic stitching of useful chapters (not just giving link) available in various OA channels including e-patashala, for compiling them in the form of Text Books but after getting appropriate permission from concerned. These Text Books should be listed and recommended in the Syllabi. These are my personal views, teachers and practiceners can give more thoughts suggest steps to be taken, not just for LIS but for all disciplines useful for UG and PG level academic activities. Regards, "Access E-Resources for Academic and Research Excellence" *- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -* Dr. I.R.N. Goudar - Adjunct Professor, Mangalore University - Visiting Professor Cum Library Adviser Bangalore University Library, BANGALORE - 560056 - Ex. Visiting Professor Cum Library Adviser, UoM, Mysore - Ex. Scientist 'G' and Head, ICAST, NAL, Bangalore - Ex. Dy Librarian, IITM, Chennai - Ex. Scientist (Information), IICT, Hyderabad - Fulbright Scholar, Univ. of Michigan and Columbia Univ, USA (1995-96) - British Council Scholar (1982-83) E-mail: goudarishwar@gmail.com Tel: 080-23215510 Mob: 91+9611165781 (If not reachable pl try land line) -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.