Indian president wants Indian libraries digitized and OA Prez calls for digitisation of libraries, Deccan Herald, November 22, 2005. (Thanks to LIS News.) Excerpt: President A P J Abdul Kalam wants all libraries in schools, colleges and universities to be digitised within the next four years. At the valedictory of Mahabharata Utsav, organised by the Mahabharata Research Foundation, here on Monday, the President said the digitisation of books has to be in regional languages. Knowledge has always been the prime mover for prosperity. It is important to take up the mission of integrating all forms of knowledge and culture into our digital library....The President unveiled a state-of-art Digital Mobile van to document, conserve, digitise and disseminate manuscripts. He suggested that the mobile digital library can become a partner of the Digital Library of India portal, a project aimed at providing free-to-read searchable collection of one million books. ---- One hopes that the heads of academic and research institutions and their librarians are listening! Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam]