Dear Friends We would like to share some of our experiences in working with college libraries in Andhra Pradesh in their modernization plans. These experiences and observations are being made as dispassionately as possible. The intention is not to blame any one. In fact there are too many players and we believe that all are responsible, to some degree or other, for the problems we found. Many college libraries seem to want to automate their libraries only to please either AICTE and NAAC visiting teams. We would like to share two of our experiences and our conclusions. 1. One college was expecting a NAAC team to visit the college in a week's time. There was a frantic call from the Principal asking that our software be installed the next day and their data in MS-Access be converted in time for the visit of the NAAC team. The software was installed on a system that was supposed to have been acquired for the library, their data was migrated; the NAAC committee came and went. Soon after, we approached the librarian of the college to find out when we could train him and his colleagues so that they could make full use of the software. We were surprised to learn that the system on which we had installed the software and data was in fact the property of the Physics department who promptly reclaimed their machine. The librarian told us that since they did not have any system, there was no point of getting any training. 2. Similar scenario except that this time it was the AICTE committee's visit. Frantic call. Installation of software. However, this time, we had to convert data that was entered as an Excel spreadsheet. When we saw the data we were aghast. Both the professional librarians of the college had M.L.I.Sc degrees, one even had a post-graduate diploma relating to automation. We pointed out that their data had apparently been entered without reference to any standard. For instance author names were entered in the normal form e.g. Peter Drucker instead of Drucker, Peter. When a monograph had more than one personal name, these were entered as a single string without any separators between the names. They did not think it necessary to subject index the items in their collection. All books in chemistry (organic, inorganic, physical, molecular, etc.) were subsumed under the code CHE standing for chemistry. Similar was the case for books in other subjects. We asked them why they had not used any standard subject headings list. We were told that the NAAC/AICTE team would be interested in seeing all books held by the library, say on chemistry, and therefore simply by searching under CHE they would be able to show a list of all books on chemistry. We pointed out that this could have easily been achieved also by searching for books under the Dewey classification number 54. They had no answer to this. There were other lacunae in their data which will take long to describe. Our conclusions based on these two and other experiences: 1.Managements of colleges are driven more by NAAC and AICTE to modernize their libraries than real academic considerations. 2.Librarians have very little or no initiative to drive the modernization of their libraries. Some librarians even complained that they do not have the time to learn new ways of doing things. 3.Only a few libraries can boast of having a connection to the Internet. 4.In spite of all the graduate/postgraduate education that Library schools seem to be providing to students of library science, the quality of the work of college librarians seems to be far from even satisfactory. 5.College librarians have not carved a niche for themselves as useful members of the academic community they serve in these libraries. Understandably, their salaries too are poor and motivation to make an impact often non-existent. 6.We found from the data conversion exercises that we did and from visits to college libraries that these are no better than text book banks and not eclectic collections of older and contemporary books, and useful reference materials. In quite a few places, we found that as many as 30 copies of all text books are acquired. The library's budget serves little else than for the acquisition of text books. Students depend on the library mainly for text books and little else. This reflects only on the text book and examination oriented teaching that obviously predominates in these colleges. 7.Apparently, NAAC and AICTE committee's look only at the nitty gritty of libraries and their modernization. They do not seem to look deeper to see if libraries serve a greater purpose as knowledge centres and whether their collections reflect to some extent at least modern thought and principles. There are no bench marks for collection evaluation. All the above observations are made with our experience of colleges in big cities of A.P. What the situation is in smaller towns is anybody's guess. Is the situation in other states better? In fairness, it must be pointed out that librarians in special library's do not fortunately fit into the same mould as those in college libraries. They have created an impact and are well sought after. There are too many cats to bell: librarians, library schools, managements, NAAC, AICTE, professional bodies, teachers, etc., etc., and mice alone cannot help. Like the proverbial elephant and six blind men, each entity seems to seeing its own side of the problem . L J Haravu Trustee Kesavan Inst. of Information & Knowledge Management