Dear All, A vibrant librarian needs to be conversant with the subject he deals with, library science and information technologies in the right mix with focus on practical utility to his professional job. Any library professional can become well versed in those three areas, if he pays a little attention and spends some time on the Internet, newspapers like The Hindu, All India Radio/Door Darshan or some quality books. That is not enough if he wants to improve further. He needs to concentrate more on developing his writing and presentation skills. He should be able to write anything with clarity, brevity, simplicity, logical sequencing etc and present anything with proper salutation, intonation, pace, tone etc, if he needs to remain as an able professional. All known professionals in any field have or developed those qualities. Needless to say that those skill sets cannot be attained without good reading which is an essential quality required for any librarian. If the librarian is a reasonably good reader of books, he can easily grasp the requirement of readers or information seekers and can mould his library collection and services in tune with their requirements. In order to develop those capabilities, the library schools can devote 30 minutes just before the lunch break every day for an internal seminar. In the seminar, a student should present a paper of around 500-1000 words on a topic of his passion. The paper must be chosen and prepared well ahead. The class mates and teachers should make the deliberations in the session a lively one benefiting each other. The busy teachers may benefit more from such session than probably the students. The session can be included for internal assessment of the students. Seminar session should be set by drawing 15 minutes each from the curricular sessions and the lunch time (say 12.45 to 1.15 PM). If the session is healthy and lively the discussions should continue during the lunch time too. The library schools get the last choice of students as they do not care to provide ample ambience to develop the personality of the students joining there. Whereas the management schools, even though they deal with a subject that cannot be worth mentioned even as a discipline, get high caliber students because of the availability of most conducive environment for developing anyone's capability fully. Regards, K Rajasekharan Librarian, Kerala Institute of Local Administration(KILA) Mulagunnathukavu, Thrissur - 680581 , India Ph 0487 - 2200244+208 (O) 2201428 (R) -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.