Dear Colleagues: Dear All: The enthusiasm shown by DRTC students through their active participation in the form of valuable postings and sending responses to queries in the LIS-Forum is praiseworthy and worthy of emulation by one and all. I have personally benefitted a lot from their contribution. This is a bright ray of hope. Perhaps, because of lack of Internet access, students of LIS from Indian universities are unable to participate. How about providing Internet access to all the Departments of Library and Information Science in India and offer facilities to LIS faculty and students to handle "live" reference queries (under the guidance of their Reference Tutor) from the public in the ASK YOUR LIBRARIAN service?This would offer the LIS students "real life" examples of the queries they would be facing in their career in future. More than the IT, we have to regain the joy of library service to make our professional life much more meaningful and inspiring. Also, there is an urgent need to make SOUL package an integral component of all our LIS education programmes at the university level. Once this is done, we would have within a couple of years, LIS manpower capable of appreciating and handling properly the SOUL software. It is hoped that INFLIBNET under the dynamic leadership of Dr TAV Murthy would break institutional barriers and strengthen all the DLIS in the country to make them adequately IT- equipped so that they would be participating actively in the HRD to support the INFLIBNET project. It is high time to recognise all the DLISs in the country as the stakeholders and beneficiaries of INFLIBNET programme. The logic is simple: if you train a member of the library staff, he/she would be often be contributing to his/her parent library. But, if you train a member of the faculty or student of DLIS in an Indian university, the benefits would be far-reaching and percolate to various sections of the society. Thank you Sincerely T.V. Prafulla Chandra Senior Editor --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NISC Export Services Pvt. Ltd. (an affiliate of NISC International, Inc. USA) S-1 Ballad Estates, St.Ann's School Road, Tarnaka, Hyderabad 500 017 Andhra Pradesh, India - Tel:+91 40 27001517 Tel/Fax:+91 40 27002538 WWW.NISC.COM A company in service to NISC worldwide. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------