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Ms Denise Phua, Supervisor of Pathlight School Board,
Mr Yew Teng Leong, Chairman of Pathlight School,
Ms Linda Kho, Principal of Pathlight School,
Ms Lim Soo Hoon, Chairman of the National Library Board (NLB),
Dr Varaprasad, Chief Executive of NLB,
Teachers and staff,
Students,
Distinguished guests,
First, let me say I feel very welcome to be here. You have a champion in Denise to make sure that people with special needs will always be on the radar screen and will always occupy centrestage, whether it is in Parliament or in discussions outside Parliament.
2 We are launching Molly here today. The NLB has over the years, as Dr Prasad said earlier, has always been one of the most active, most challenged statutory boards, meaning they never let the status quo remain the status quo. And you know that over the years, we had one and then three libraries. Today, we got 22 libraries all over the island. I think we are still refurbishing and rebuilding at least two more. You can look forward to a network of 24 libraries. The challenge today is not the physical availability of libraries, but rather, reaching out and making sure that people who can benefit from access to books know about it and are given the access to it. It’s a kind of sampler to entice you to come and visit the main library.
3 But nevertheless, having a mobile library like this – it is connected in real time through 3.5G to the national libraries. You can check on books and search for books. You can get access to all the information available at the national libraries. You can borrow, you can return, and I suspect you can also pay fines. So it is truly a mobile, always on, always connected extension of the library. But it is there as a portal, an invitation to come and access the books.
4 And we’re launching it here, as I’ve checked with Denise, that there are only 500 books in the Pathlight library. I’m sure she’s going to fix that and increase the number. But by bringing a mobile library with 3,000 titles here every three weeks (by the way, three weeks because that is the length you can borrow books before you have to return them), that means that there will be access to a much wider range of books. Dr Prasad has also promised that they will select the books carefully, a selected set of books to appeal to this group.
5 Because it is moving around, Molly will reach out to a much wider group of students, other members of the community, who would otherwise not have access to the books. So this is a very, very good idea, very very good scheme and I’m glad that I have the privilege of launching it here, doubly glad that it is here at Pathlight. So let me again say to all of you, thank you very much for this privilege and I think we will in our usual NLB way, make a little bit of history to go with each step forward.
6 Thank you very much.
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