Dear Sir/Madam, This is in response to some of the issues that raised by the respected information Profs. The topics that we have been discussing for the past few days have been completely driven by the notion of globalization. Technology should be a part of the curriculum and every new entrant should be in a position to upgrade his knowledge to stay in the competition. The question is, should we completely embrace the technology or is there nothing to study in the library domain except few facets. As Dillon points out that “technology has permeated all we do in this field; it is a foundational for the discipline in the twenty-first century, not a component that can be ignored or taught separately. But Dillon’s above verbatim emphasizes is that we do need technology to thrive in the 21st century but not to the extent that we should wear the mask of the technologists or software designers. Even the modern technologies that we have been using over the years in one or the other way have molded and designed based on the traditional concept of information organization. It is note worthy here to mention the classic work of Licklider’s “Libraries of the future”, where Licklider talks so eloquently about the contribution that library science dsicpline brought into shape the procognitive systems of the 60’s. He went on to emphasize the inter-disciplinary collaboration by putting the library science as a core, which could contribute immensely for the enhancement of the human-computer interactions in the future. What all these shows is that library science domain is as relevant as forever. But we do change according to the needs of the present environment. It is not that we should completely forget the library domain and embrace technology. Education is a life long process and every day we have to learn new things and upgrade our knowledge. One of the participants have mentioned that he has lost is job simple because of that he is from different stream. MNCs run with the profit motives and they recruit who best suit to their work environment. That is altogether different context. Another aspects is that libraries in India especially Govt schools and colleges are in very bad condition, whenever we get a chance to work in that environment., librarians are not respected, so the need is the quality of the libraries and creating the awareness among others about the importance of the library. In England and America parents always take their children to book store and cultivate reading habits in a early age, but this is not the case in our country. Why this aspects I have mentioned here is that the discussion is completely driven by the motto of train young minds to be an employee of the MNCs not to make them to see the problems that we Indians are facing. Over the years 117000 farmers have committed suicide in India- one of the reason for this is the lack of information. So here comes the role of the librarians and information professionals. I conclude this by quoting the Dillion’s words “the organization and management of information, the digital divide, the level of literacy in our society, and freedom of access to published information have become mainstream issues for our culture. This may be a once in a century opportunity to convince those in the power that the field has a real contribution to make. Ref: Dillon, A. and Norris, A. (2005) Crying Wolf: an examination and reconsideration of the perception of crisis in LIS education. Journal of Education in Library and Information Science, 46,4 280-298. Your Sincerely Vasantha Raju N Mysore --------------------------------- Save all your chat conversations. Find them online. -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.