Friends: I am concerned about the quality of training we provide in our country to would be librarians and information scientists. The other day I had received my copy of the Bulletin of ASIST, which I always find very readable. Prof. Blaise Cronin, who won the ASIS&T Award of Merit for 2006, had written a two-page acceptance speech. He is an extraordinarily good writer and I enjoy reading him. In his acceptance speech, Prof. Cronin, whom I first came to know more than two decades ago when I reviewed his cute little book "The Citation Process", had mentioned the names of many outstanding information scientists, spanning more than two generations, whose writings had shaped his career or influenced him in some way. Among them are Hans Peter Luhn Robert Fairthorne Cyril Cleerdon Eugene Garfield Wilfrid Lancaster Gerard Salton Tefko Saracevic Henry Small Don Swanson Howard White Bertram Brookes Michael Buckland Pauline Autherton Cochrane Wiliam Goffman Belver Griffith Robert Hayes John Martyn Stephen Robertson Karen Sparck Jones Irene Farkas-Conn Peter Taylor Alan Gilchrist Elizabeth Lowry-Corry Brian Vickery Robert Williams Ben Ami-Lipetz Derek de Solla Price Nick Belkin Boyd Rayward Jack Meadows. I met a young librarian with a Masters degree from a leading Indian university and a couple of years of work experience and showed him the article and asked him if he had read any of these authors. He was honest enough to admit that he had heard of the name of Garfield in connection with indexing, and his teachers never even mentioned the names of the others. On another day I was asked to meet the final year Masters students of LIS in a famous Indian university. Some students would not speak a word, despite repeated cajoling. Their knowledge was far below what one would expect of a Masters student. Without preparation, they may not be able to appreciate Tefko Saracevic's edited volume "Introduction to Information Science" or Irene Farkas-Conn's history of the field "From Documentation to Information Science." To be fair, they may understand some portions of Garfield's Essays of an Information Scientist, as Garfield often wrote not for the specialists but for the lay readers. Many years ago I was in a selection committee in a chemistry laboratory and I asked a candidate for the post of an assistant librarian if he knew any chemistry as his job would be to serve chemists; scientists may want to make a substructure search and unless one knows chemical structures it will be almost impossible to make such searches. The candidate replied that in the LIS school they taught 'organization of knowledge' and therefore there was no need to know chemistry! When asked to explain 'open access to journal literature' another candidate said that some libraries allowed users to move freely in the library and pick up the books and journals they wanted to read, and he was totally ignorant of making journal literature freely available on the Internet. I have attended a few national conferences. There is hardly any originality in the papers presented and the level of discussion is appallingly low. We need to do something and do it quickly. We need to inculcate the habit of reading in our students. Blaise cronin says that when he was a graduate student at Belfast he "poured over copies of American Documentation, Aslib Proceedings, IP&M, ARIST and the Journal of Documentation with enthusiasm of a kid in a candy store, stumbling upon seminal papers". We need to guide our students to the masters and their great writings. As the field is expanding, the need to keep abreast of developments is becoming more and more important. We need to improve the communication skills of our students. We should award degrees only to the deserving. Years ago I had taught at the INSDOC Training School and I had the great pleasure of working with people like Prof. Thyaga Natarajan and Prof. Guha, and was amazed at their simplicity and passion for reading and teaching. Even the next level faculty had the qualities of good teachers. I have heard about the high quality of training imparted at DRTC, but have no first hand knowledge, except attending a few conferences and giving a few lectures to students. The training imparted at NCSI, largely thanks to the late Dr T B Rajashekar, is indeed very good. We need to make sure that training imparted in every LIS school in the country is of the highest quality. As Greg Chappell said there should be a system where those who do not perform are automatically sent out. According to him that is why Australia performs very well in cricket. Best wishes. Arun ___________________________________________________________ Copy addresses and emails from any email account to Yahoo! Mail - quick, easy and free. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/trueswitch2.html -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.