At Amrita, students are provided access to world-class resources and infrastructure.

Amrita also actively supports efforts to bring these resources with easy reach of all students in India.

It was with these background motives in mind that the Central Library at the Amritapuri campus hosted a one-day regional workshop on Delnet Resources, Services and Facilities.

Participants included over 70 librarians and professionals who traveled from various colleges in Kerala and Tamil Nadu to attend.

Delnet was established to promote the sharing of resources among libraries through the development of a network. Although initially limited to the city of New Delhi, now the network encompasses over 2000 libraries all over India and even abroad.

Member libraries are provided access to computerized services including open source library software and databases accessible over the internet.

Dr. H. K. Kaul, Director, Delnet was in Amrita to speak to the workshop participants.

Speaking about knowledge organization, Dr. Kaul outlined challenges academic libraries face today, including resistance to new solutions, physical books being replaced by e-books and media labs and the vast number of researcher, government and vendor solutions.

ntroducing Koha, an integrated library system, which is open source, and can be modified according to user needs, the Delnet staff listed its major features including multi-lingual and multi-user support and a customizable web-based opac architecture.

The staff also introduced proprietary software such as Delplus (for library management) and Del-Windows (to create bibliographic records), both of which conform to international standards.

“In a country like India, the cooperative cataloguing or cooperative collection building is still not in vogue,” stated Dr. Sangeeta Kaul, Network Manager of Delnet, during the workshop.

Earlier, during the inaugural ceremony, M. Prasad, in-charge of the Central Library at Amritapuri campus, shared distinguishing features of the Amrita library.

“Our library is fully automated and has excellent print and online collections; it provides strong academic support services for students and scholars in our institution,” he said.

Also present at the inaugural were Dr. K. Sankaran, Principal, Amrita School of Engineering and Br. Sankara Chaitanya, Medical Director, Amrita School of Ayurveda.

At the closure of the one-day workshop, certificates of participation and CDs with the open-source Koha software were distributed to all participants.

“It was a great opportunity to learn about Delnet resources and the Koha software,” stated participant Regil Nadh from Rajagiri College.

February 7, 2012
Amritapuri Campus