School online library makes work easy

 Kendriya Vidyalaya (KV), Narimedu has become the first school in Madurai to operate full-fledged online library, catering to the needs of thousands of students.Over the last one year, the number of visitors to the site(http://kv1madurailibrary.wordpress.com) has grown at a rapid pace to about 1.3lakh. Most of the visitors accessed resource materials, e-books, referencematerial and other syllabi with the help of this library. According to K Ramasamy, the school librarian, visitors to the site can access17,487 books, 74 magazines and four leading English dailies available. Thelibrary was computerised in June 2010 with help of the 'auto lib softwaresystem'. He also said that students stand to gain a lot from this library, asit can be accessed anytime, unlike a regular library, which shuts down afterschool hours."We have categories of information including creative corner. About 15 students from our schoolcontribute articles on science, personality development and other areas ofinterest on a weekly basis. We have collected e-books on English poems, yoga,health, science and autobiographies of historians and have published it online.We also have a separate section called the High Order Thinking Skills (HOTS),especially targeted at those students studying 10th and 12th in CBSEsyllabus." Ramasamy said.The online library has also made work easy for teachers of CBSE syllabus, who are able to getcontinuous and comprehensive evaluation methods for their students.T S Sreenivasan, an English teacher said, "We download continuous and comprehensive evaluation methodsfrom the online library and teach the students. The new announcements regardingthe CBSE system are fed into the library. Hence, other CBSE school teachers arealso benefited by this. In fact, parents of the students also visit the onlinelibrary frequently and teach their children."R Arthi, a11th standard student of KV said, "It's superb. We can easily get IIT, AIEEE and NTSE modelquestion papers, which help us gain admission to these courses. This libraryalso has a readers club, where the teachers and students assre the members. Wecan also give suggestions to the librarian to upload new books. The studentcommunity has benefited by this." V P Vishnu Prasad, another student said that as his family does not have atelevision at home, books are his friends. He frequently reads all the e-books,as well as other books from the library. Prasad said that he has read more than50 science books through the online library. C Muthiah, principal of the school said that the younger generation are moreinterested in reading books online, hence they decided to set up the onlinelibrary. "We have provided all kind of information in the online libraryincluding tourism, law, banking, film production, medicine and others. It willhelp in increasing the reading habits of the student community," he said.Source |Times of India  | 18 August 2011