Charles Kong Soo

The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies' (UWI) new sin­gle vir­tu­al li­brary space is a ma­jor mile­stone as the uni­ver­si­ty con­tin­ues to lead "by miles" in com­pet­i­tive high­er ed­u­ca­tion, says Pro­fes­sor Clement Sankat, PVC and St Au­gus­tine cam­pus prin­ci­pal.He was speak­ing at the launch of The UWI Li­braries' In­for­ma­tion Con­nex­ion (UWIlinC): sin­gle vir­tu­al li­brary space at the cam­pus' Al­ma Jor­dan Li­brary on Oc­to­ber 4."This is a very big day for the uni­ver­si­ty. It is a ma­jor mile­stone as the uni­ver­si­ty con­tin­ues to evolve and make it­self known to the world," Sankat said."To bring all the UWI sub­scribed re­sources and the in­tel­lec­tu­al out­put from our var­i­ous li­brary col­lec­tions and to make these avail­able to users lo­cal­ly, re­gion­al­ly and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly is tru­ly phe­nom­e­nal.

He said in do­ing so UWI will achieve greater vis­i­bil­i­ty and greater pres­ence in the hearts and minds of its stake­hold­ers."This is ex­act­ly what we need to do to con­tin­ue to dis­tin­guish our­selves as a uni­ver­si­ty in a very com­pet­i­tive high­er ed­u­ca­tion land­scape," Sankat said. "I al­ways like to see UWI in front, and we are lead­ing by miles.The new UWIlinC knowl­edge por­tal project was five years in the mak­ing and will pro­vide in­stan­ta­neous ac­cess to a range of li­brary ma­te­r­i­al in­clud­ing digi­tised print, au­dio, video and im­ages from all the li­braries across all four UWI cam­pus­es via a sin­gle Web space.