The participants of the Librarian Coordinates Meeting listening to the resource person, at New Delhi.

The Department of Education under the Central Tibetan Administration organised a Coordinators meeting for six Librarians from Tibetan schools in India from 7-9 October at the Bureau of His Holiness the Dalai Lama at New Delhi.

The three-day meeting was aimed to assist the Librarians in strengthening their perspectives on books, improving library environment and assigning planning and mentoring in the field. It was inaugurated by the Secretary of the Bureau Mr. Tsewang Gyalpo Arya and Education Officer Mrs. Tenzin Legzey.

On the first day, resource persons gave an idea of coordinating librarians of Tibetan schools by nominating coordinators, which will comprise of three cluster librarians. The Librarian coordinators were identified by resource person based on; Direct experience on meeting in person and at workshop sites, Initiatives and efforts to reach out and connect with resource person on matters related to library and Participation on distance groups (Google group and facebook group, etc).

A specific effort was made to keep the cluster group to be uniformly represented by members from different managements of the Tibetan school administration so that the librarians coordinating group could be represented by 2 representatives from Sambhota Schools, 3 from TCV schools and 1 from the Tibetan Home Schools.

The next day, the participants visited the public Library of American Center situated at Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi where they were warmly welcomed by the library team of American Center and they were briefed about its library’s working procedure with video presentation. The participants were given one-year free access to its e-library (online library).

The team further proceeded to the American Embassy School situated at Chanakya Puri, New Delhi where they visited libraries of elementary, middle and the senior section of the school. During their visit to the middle school library and the senior school library, they had discussed and exchanged views on various topics such as the book choice, mode of accessing books, book care and maintenance, activities in the library and etc.

As an exposure to the metropolitan city of Delhi, the group visited to Kids Section in Khan market, New Delhi on the third of the meeting where the librarians went through variety of books on both fiction and non-fiction written by good authors. Our resource person guided the librarians and advised them how to make a good choice of books. The librarians were also explained about the necessary actions to be taken while shopping books for school libraries.

The last day of the meeting was commenced with critical discussion and the review of the visit and it was concluded with a round of feed back where the librarians shared their growth and positive changes in work and attitude towards librarians since the Librarian’s Empowerment program was started by DoE.

The resource persons of the meeting were Dr. Usha Mukunda and Dr. Sujata Norohna .The meeting was funded by USAID through the Tibet fund.