The Role of Networking in Building Knowledge Societies through Libraries

Walk into a well-equipped library today and something has quietly changed. It isn’t just rows of books anymore. It’s computer terminals, shared catalogues, and quiet links to collections sitting hundreds of kilometres away. This shift sits at the heart of what education planners call knowledge networking: connecting libraries, research centres, and information systems so that knowledge doesn’t stay locked inside one building or one city. For a country as vast and unevenly connected as India, this isn’t a technical afterthought. It is central to building what policymakers now call a knowledge society.

Why knowledge has become the currency of power 🔗

Information used to travel slowly, through printed journals, postal exchanges, and word of mouth. That pace created real gaps. A researcher in a metro city could access global literature within days. Someone in a small town often waited months, if the material arrived at all. This gap is what policy discussions call the digital or knowledge divide, and closing it is now treated as a development priority rather than a library convenience.

UNESCO’s framing of this problem is useful here. Instead of talking only about an information society built on faster networks, UNESCO pushes the idea of inclusive knowledge societies, grounded in four principles: freedom of expression, access to quality education for everyone, respect for cultural and linguistic diversity, and universal access to information, especially material in the public domain. UNESCO’s own position paper argues that effective use of information and communication technology offers real prospects for human development, but only when it is paired with these broader social commitments.

The distinction between information and knowledge matters in practice. Information flow alone doesn’t guarantee development. What matters is whether people can actually use that information to build skills, make decisions, and improve their circumstances. A country can have excellent internet infrastructure and still remain information-rich but knowledge-poor, if large parts of its population cannot turn that access into usable learning.

From an information society to a knowledge society 🔗

A landmark UNESCO World Report drew a sharp line between these two ideas. An information society is built on technology: faster cables, more servers, cheaper devices. A knowledge society goes further. It asks whether people can convert that information into skills, employment, and civic participation. The report also warned that without deliberate policy choices around education and open access, better infrastructure can end up widening inequality rather than narrowing it, since people who already have skills tend to benefit first from any new network.

For adult and continuing education planners, this warning is directly relevant. Building fibre-optic connections to a district library does little good if the adults who need that library most were never taught how to search a catalogue, evaluate a source, or use a digital device with confidence.

Libraries as networking hubs, not just book warehouses 🔗

For decades, an Indian library’s job was straightforward: acquire books, catalogue them, and lend them out. That model made sense when knowledge was physical and limited to what a single building could store. It makes far less sense today, when a continuing-education learner might need a research paper that only exists in a database three states away, or when a small college library could never individually afford the journals a university library takes for granted.

This is exactly why networking has become central to library and information science. A network turns individual libraries into nodes of a larger knowledge-sharing system, where collections, expertise, and infrastructure are pooled instead of duplicated. A single small library stays limited to what it owns. A networked library can offer its members access to what an entire country owns.

India’s library networking story 🔗

India’s push toward organised library networks goes back to the 1980s, when rising subscription costs, shrinking budgets, and limited shelf space forced institutions to think about sharing resources instead of hoarding them. City-level networks such as CALIBNET in Kolkata and DELNET in Delhi were among the earliest attempts to let libraries within a city share catalogues and lend across institutions, followed by similar systems in Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, and Hyderabad. These city networks demonstrated that resource-sharing could be both cost-effective and technically workable, well before nationwide broadband made it easy.

The more decisive step came in 1996, when the University Grants Commission established the Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET) as an autonomous inter-university centre. INFLIBNET’s mandate was to build a nationwide, high-speed network connecting university and research libraries, so a student at a smaller state university could reach journals, theses, and databases that only a handful of elite institutions had previously been able to afford. Its shared repositories now function as one of the country’s largest common knowledge pools for research scholars and continuing learners alike.

University networks aren’t the only piece of this story. For post-literacy and continuing education specifically, grassroots public libraries matter just as much as elite research repositories. The Raja Ram Mohan Roy Library Foundation, an autonomous body under the Ministry of Culture, was set up to build a national library system by giving financial and technical assistance to public libraries and by promoting library development at the state and district level. Its matching-grant schemes exist precisely so that a small-town or rural library isn’t left out of the same networking effort that connects premier universities.

The digital backbone: NKN and NDLI 🔗

None of this networking works without physical connectivity, and that is the role of the National Knowledge Network (NKN). Approved by the Cabinet Committee on Infrastructure in 2010, NKN connects universities, research institutions, libraries, laboratories, and even healthcare and agricultural bodies on one high-speed backbone, so that collaborative research, distance education, and digital libraries are not limited by any single institution’s budget or location.

Connectivity alone is only half the picture; content is the other half. The National Digital Library of India (NDLI), sponsored by the Ministry of Education, was built as a single-window search platform that pulls together learning resources from libraries and repositories across the country, with interface support for multiple Indian languages so access isn’t limited to English-fluent users. Together, NKN and NDLI illustrate what knowledge and information management really means at a national scale: connectivity and content working as one system, rather than as two separate projects run in isolation.

Creating inclusive knowledge networks across India 🔗

A network only does its job if it actually reaches the people who need it most, and that’s where the picture gets complicated. Post-literacy and continuing education learners are rarely sitting in a university library with dedicated fibre connectivity. Many are in small towns and villages, where the nearest public library may have limited opening hours, an outdated collection, and no working internet connection at all.

Studies of digital literacy programmes in rural India confirm this gap. Even after national missions expanded digital access on paper, research on rural training programmes shows that remote, tribal, and rural regions continue to see weaker reach, and that training efforts often struggle with high dropout rates and inconsistent follow-up support. A knowledge network that stops at the district headquarters and never reaches the village-level reading room isn’t genuinely inclusive. It is simply a smaller, updated version of the old divide.

What inclusive networking actually requires 🔗

Building a network that truly serves adult and continuing learners means connecting four layers, not just one.

Local libraries are the village and taluka-level reading rooms that serve as the first point of contact for post-literacy learners, often the only physical space where someone can ask a librarian for help rather than search alone.

Regional and state networks are the public library systems and state resource centres that aggregate local demand and route it toward larger collections, filling gaps that a single local library cannot fund on its own.

National systems, including INFLIBNET, NDLI, and NKN, hold the country’s major digital and physical collections and provide the backbone that regional networks plug into.

Global resources, such as open-access journals and international repositories, become reachable for Indian institutions precisely because the same backbone connectivity that links a state library to Delhi also links it, in principle, to the rest of the world.

Each layer depends on the one below it actually functioning well. A national digital library is only as useful to a continuing-education learner as the local library that helps them access it, explains how to search it, and has a working device and connection in the first place. This is why policy discussions on library networking increasingly tie infrastructure spending to staff training, local-language content, and last-mile connectivity, rather than treating any single piece as sufficient by itself.

For adult and continuing education in India, the practical takeaway is fairly direct. Knowledge networking isn’t a side project for technology-focused libraries. It is the mechanism through which a library fulfils its actual purpose: making sure that where someone was born, or how much their local library can individually afford, doesn’t decide how much knowledge they get to access.

What do you think? If your nearest public library were fully linked into national and global knowledge networks tomorrow, what would change first for your community: exam preparation material, skill-building courses, or simply reliable internet access? And how much of India’s knowledge divide do you think comes down to missing connectivity, versus people simply not knowing these networks already exist?

References

1. https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/policy/untaskteam_undf/groupb_unesco_knowledge_societies.pdf
2. https://www.cedefop.europa.eu/en/news/towards-knowledge-societies-first-unesco-world-report
3. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/lisp11/chapter/library-networks-and-consortia-in-india/
4. https://www.inflibnet.ac.in/
5. https://culture.gov.in/raja-ram-mohan-roy-library-foundation-kolkata
6. https://nkn.gov.in/about-us
7. https://project.ndl.gov.in/
8. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11984724/