Dear Colleagues, It is good to see the ongoing discussion about integration of ICT technologies to LIS Courses in India. I agree that we need to incorporate ICT in LIS Syllabus, and most of the Departments have done that already. I doubt about the quantity practical orientation provided by them, it varies from one to another. A good IT lab with latest hardware and software is still a dream for many of the Departments. Few of them have collaboration with IT / Computer Science departments. This is the era or Globalisation and Specialisation. India is trying to become a developed nation, and we have to think from this background. In this regards, I have two points to discuss. 1. Our main problem is that, we do not have a "National Accreditation Process for Library Science Programmes" in India. NAAC accredits the Universities as a total. There are national library associations bearing this responsibility in developed nations, like ALA for USA, CILIP for UK etc. The accreditation process is carried out regularly and Departments will get accreditation for 5 /6 years. The course, syllabus, teaching methods, ability of faculty, facilities etc are standardised or regularised through this process. Departments failing in accreditation can not attract students, because the employers always prefer to appoint candidates with an accredited degree. If we implement this system in India, we can set standards for LIS Departments and its courses. We can approach associations from other countries to get our Courses recognised, may be in developed countries like USA and UK. Indian Library Association should take up this issue and find out the ways to start accreditation process in India. This will help us in making our candidates globally accepted. With my experience, I know that it is not simple as I wrote here, but we should start somewhere. 2. Second point is about starting new (specialised) courses. If you watch LIS Departments in developed countries, you can see atleast two or three master level courses are offered by them. Those are specialised courses, but clearly fits in our area of services, like Knowledge Management, Information Science, Medical/Helath librarianship, Information Systems, Electronic Information Management, Digital Libraries, School Librarianship etc apart from pure Library and Information Science. In India, our tendency is that, we compress all these subjects in to a 2 year course and call it as MLISc. Along with MLISc, why can't we think of starting few more Masters from any of the above mentioned areas. We also need specialisation in our Courses to supply specialised library professionals to the present vibrant job market. Market needs Knowledge Managers, Digital Librarians, Medical Librarians, Information Analysts etc. For this, along with the present faculty members, we may need new members or collaboration with other departments. I hope our teachers, practitioners and celebreties in Indian LIS will give importance to these two points. Thanks for reading. Dr. J. K. Vijayakumar --------------------------------- Need a vacation? Get great deals to amazing places on Yahoo! Travel. -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.