Sir/Madam, Sir, Since you have taken the charge of ministry of higher education in Karnataka, higher education department has become so proactive and abuzz with lot of new initiatives. Higher education is become hot topic of our daily discourses in recent time. You have introduced new counseling system for college lecturer transfers. Your Govt. came up with Karnataka State Knowledge Commission. You have come up with new reforms in current examination systems in our universities and colleges. Planning to set up a separate examination board. You are bringing uniformity and standardization in admission procedure of all universities. Sir these all are great. But you have forgotten vital link of higher education-that is libraries. I am writing this letter to draw your attention to some of the basic problems we librarians are facing in our colleges. Point number one: Sir in most of the degree college we have no rooms to set up libraries. We need spacious rooms to develop good libraries. Point number two: We need supportive man power. Both professional and non-professionals. Otherwise it is difficult to have proper system in our libraries. Point number three: In most cases head of the institutions are placing orders for book vendors. Semester books are becoming outdated quickly. Please do something to stop purchasing huge number of semester books. It won’t help for students to improve their learning ability and curiosity. Point number four: Library funds should be given throughout the year. If you give funds at the end of the financial year, it is impossible sometime for accessioning the books and to put into circulation. Point number five: Collegiate Education Department is planning to automate college libraries. Sir Kerala has adopted a policy to use open source software in all govt. organization including educational institutions. Similar thing can be done in our state also. There are good open source softwares which can be easily adopted in college libraries. Yours A college librarian ------------------------- With best wishes Vasantha Raju N GFGC-Periyapatna Mysore Dist. The INTERNET now has a personality. YOURS! See your Yahoo! Homepage. http://in.yahoo.com/ -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.