Opening doors to a new Online Library

Change is coming faster than we imagined! The pandemic has widespread repercussions on all professional fronts including education and libraries. But human beings have unique power to find positive even in worst negative situations. As we enter the era of online teaching, collapsing physical libraries to redundancy, online resources and educational content has been the way of life all these months for school communities. Internet has abundance of resources and information, but all that wealth is randomly placed to be found only with our own skills. It implies to school students that they must spend extra screen time to look for resources. Being an IB school, August to September is high time for many assignment completions and submissions. I had spent substantial time during summer break to collate online resources but the idea to make it available using OPAC (online public access catalogue) of Library management system of Mandarin, occurred to me recently. Meeting with IT head of AKDN and Mandarin VP Global Sales and Marketing, not only made it possible to launch the ‘New Online Library’ but also hope for future collaboration on resource sharing among all Aga Khan Academies is an open window.

Now students, teachers or any other member of The Aga Khan Academy, Hyderabad can visit the Library catalogue to access the online library which has plethora of resources for students, teachers and parents.

We have opened the library with 23 Macro shelves with broad headlines arranged alphabetically catering to immediate needs and these are being developed into micro classification for further ease to locate resources.

Leave no stone unturned during this pandemic time, there may be an opportunity waiting!

Madhu Bhargava