Wednesday 25 May 2011

Tomorrow's Academic Libraries: Maybe Even Some Books

 

Imagine a library that is not only bookless but is not necessarily tied to a building, one that takes its personnel and services to patrons rather than expecting them to come to it. Two projects—one now under way at the undergraduate level and one well established at a medical library—suggest where the untethered library is headed. One approach focuses on space; the other on librarians.

Academic libraries have been beset by changes that have led some observers to wonder whether they have a future at all. Their budgets have been hit hard even as the cost of buying and storing information—whether print monographs or journal databases—continues to climb. Search engines have replaced librarians as the go-to source of information for most researchers. And students headed to the library now are more likely to be in search of a cup of coffee than to be looking for a book. If they do want a book, it might have been moved to remote storage because the library has run out of room.

Like many institutions, Drexel University, in central Philadelphia, faces a space crunch. On the positive side, Drexel's undergraduates aren't even close to abandoning the main campus library, says Danuta A. Nitecki, the university's dean of libraries. "We are just so overcrowded and packed to the brim that I don't think we will see an absence of people coming here," she says.

But what those crowds of students need and want from the library has changed. They don't come for books. They come for study space and company. Once upon a time, "you had to go where the book is," Ms. Nitecki says. The time has come to "put the library presence closer to where the students are."

So the university is building what it describes as a "bookless learning center" near where undergraduates live and eat. It will occupy what used to be a breezeway outside a student residential hall. "We identified a space that's in the heart of where our residential life is," Ms. Nitecki explains. "We used the problem—the challenge of the lack of adequate space—to redefine what the library of the future should be."

Called the Library Learning Terrace, the center will be open around the clock to give students access to the library's digital resources as well as a place to gather. It won't be staffed at all times, but students will be able to arrange for a librarian to rendezvous with them to work on projects, and professors will be able to meet groups of students there.

Many colleges and universities have replaced some stack space with a learning commons, a dedicated spot within the library where students can come to work and study together. Most academic libraries have a social-media presence too, with the aim of interacting with students and serving them virtually.

Drexel wants the learning terrace to bring the library—or some of its services, at least—to students in a flexible setting they can configure themselves. "The commonly adapted prototype is to just turn library stacks to study areas or to create a student commons and continue with service desks," says Kimberly I. Miller, Drexel's director of design. "We see this prototype as a hybrid where the librarians and the faculty are more engaged and technology is readily available to target learning," she said in an e-mail.

In Ms. Miller's view, one of the Learning Terrace's main attractions is that students themselves will decide how to use the space. The furniture will be on casters so it can be easily moved to accommodate groups. There will be a general open area with power sources built into the floor, so the space can be used in a variety of ways. Ms. Miller expects there will also be projection facilities, for those who want to work with audiovisual materials. More technology will be incorporated as the space develops. Part of the idea is to observe how students actually use the space.

"With each new technology and class of students will come new ways of learning," Ms. Miller says. "Creating a space that can adapt to those changes is a challenge." The total cost of the project will run about $950,000, according to Ms. Miller, with $700,000 of that covering construction costs.

Once it's built, will the learning center attract the students it's designed to serve? The idea itself seems to appeal. Some 200 students came to two town-hall-style meetings the library held to discuss the project. "I have never seen that many students engaged and interested in an issue about libraries," Ms. Nitecki says.

Lucas S. Hippel, a senior chemical-engineering major who is president of Drexel's Undergraduate Student Government Association, helped plan and organize the town-hall meetings. Even though most students no longer go to the library to browse or borrow books, the concern he heard most often was that the new facility will be bookless. "This is going to be a step in a different direction," he says. But students welcomed the chance to have more study space. "Everyone seems really happy that Drexel is being proactive about a problem like library space," he says.

IN SOME CASES, the academic library of the future may cease to exist in physical form—at least as far as patrons are concerned. At the Johns Hopkins University, students and faculty members in the schools of medicine, nursing, and public health have no need to set foot in a dedicated library building. The library, through specialists known as "informationists," comes to them.

The informationist program takes the concept of embedded librarians—who work in classrooms, labs, and other settings outside the library—and adapts it to the needs of health-care students and researchers. "Here it means actually going into the departments and doing whatever kinds of work the department needs," says Sue M. Woodson, associate director for digital collections at the university's Welch Medical Library.

The program was inspired by research on library users' needs that was initiated by the Hopkins library director, Nancy K. Roderer, when she arrived at the university in 2000. "People needed their journal articles online wherever they were, and they needed really good interfaces to get to them," Ms. Woodson says. "They needed librarians on occasion. What they didn't need was a building."

With its new Medical Education Building, Hopkins has state-of-the-art study space available. That means a trip to the old 1930s-era medical library no longer tempts many students or their professors, according to Ms. Woodson. "People like to work where they are," she says.

Today, many or most of the resources needed for teaching and research don't require a physical library to house them. Journal articles and research papers can be obtained in digital form, and the medical library buys fewer and fewer print books. "It's not like we throw out the entire collection," Ms. Woodson says, but it's being culled.

So patrons' changing habits and the digitization of research materials have contributed to the dwindling appeal of the older library building. The librarians, too, no longer find it an appealing place to work, according to Ms. Woodson. They'd rather be out where the patrons are. The old building will close to patrons as early as next year. What will happen to the 1930s space—a classically influenced stone rectangle that looks like a smaller cousin of some of the federal-department architecture down the road in Washington, D.C.—has yet to be determined.

The medical-library staff at Hopkins has the advantage of making the shift away from physical facilities on its own terms and schedule. For libraries in general, "there's a lot of pressure to give up space, and it comes unpredictably," Ms. Woodson says. "If we had to do this fast, I don't see how we would do it."

At the moment, the informationist program includes 10 library specialists. Six of them serve eight to 10 clinical departments or user groups (medical students, for instance) in the Johns Hopkins Schools of Medicine and Nursing. The other four work with the departments of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the basic-science departments in the School of Medicine. They're assigned in part based on what areas they know best and enjoy most, but there's also a good deal of learning on the job. "We ask a lot of questions. We really do want to get to know our users," says Blair Anton, associate director for Clinical Informationist Services. "We're kind of working against the traditional view of the library and the traditional view of what you might engage a librarian for."
An informationist assigned to a certain department will sit in on meetings and research answers to questions that arise during the proceedings. He or she will conduct systematic literature reviews for researchers working on articles and grant proposals—the kind of task researchers themselves have traditionally done but now find it harder to do as digital resources become more sophisticated and the literature expands.

In fact, systematic literature reviews are among the most important work the informationists do, according to Ms. Anton. Recruited to help assess a specific medical trial or treatment, for instance, a Hopkins informationist will put in as much as 40 to 60 hours searching the relevant medical literature, then import the results into a citation-management system, filter them, and come up with a master list the researchers can analyze.

"Those kinds of projects are extraordinarily time-consuming and detailed," Ms. Anton says. And they're so central to research now that scholars are increasingly giving informationists credit as co-authors of papers that result.
Dr. Lynette Mark, an associate professor of anesthesiology and critical-care medicine at Hopkins, says she has come to rely on Ms. Anton's skills.

"From my clinical/academic practice perch, Blair is the first step of any projects I now get involved in," Dr. Mark said in an e-mail message. She lists a number of research projects on which the two have collaborated, including work on transaxillary robotic thyroidectomies, specific case treatments, and simulations for legal cases.
Like librarians everywhere, the Hopkins informationists also have a more basic mission: to teach patrons how to find and use information. Victoria H. Goode is a clinical informationist who works with about 120 medical students at a time. She trains them in some of the current essentials of research, such as how to take a research question, turn it into a searchable query, and then apply that query to a database. Ms. Goode, a former high-school librarian, is enthusiastic about the more specialized, take-it-to-the-people model of her current job.

"I enjoy being seen and being advertised not just as a librarian but as an information specialist," she says. "I can help you not just in the building, but many different places."

Saturday 14 May 2011

Automation of Government First Grade College (GFGCs) libraries in Karnataka


The Department of Collegiate Education (DCE) effort in automating college libraries in Karnataka is laudable effort. However the same zeal or enthusiasm is missing in addressing the plight of libraries and the librarians.


As many of the GFGCs librarians aware or experiencing the ground reality, this automation process of the libraries by the DCE looks absurd.  Today the librarians of these colleges are very much in need of man power, infrastructure and understanding the vital role that the libraries playing in shaping the young minds and enriching the quality of the teaching in these places by the heads of the colleges.


As mentioned above, many of the colleges are running without proper buildings, library books kept in staff room or in a very tiny place, librarian has to work in this very deplorable condition. In recent years there are genuine efforts from the government in providing financial support and land for colleges. But because of lack of understanding of the importance of libraries and lack of library building plan, the authorities build rooms in keeping view that the rooms would be used as a class room not as libraries. They allot one of the classrooms for libraries to run there. But these rooms become insufficient in
short period of time as the number of books and other library materials increases.  In many colleges, two to three classrooms were converted as libraries. Librarian has to take care of all these rooms or divide his time accordingly. The authorities at the DCE or college heads are totally alien to the ground reality. The only interest of the college principal is, student should not complain that the books are not issued to them. They never listen to librarians or they have no interest in libraries (with few exceptions).  GFGCs need principals who understand and have keen interest in overall development of
libraries/colleges.


DCE has appointed librarians to colleges but there is no supporting staff.  As experienced by many, still for many college libraries no support staff is provided. Alone they are maintaining the whole library.  Acquisitions, circulations, routine maintaining of libraries all other work is on the shoulder of the librarian. There is lot of grants for purchasing library books in recent years.  Because of lack of professional staff librarian has to take care of the acquisition process, whole year the only job that librarian can be able to do is
accessioning the books. We left no time or interest in concentrating other library works.


Another reality is the power problem.  As many colleges are situated in rural areas or tulak head quarters, power supply is very serious problem. We hardly get two hours of power supply every day. With this sorts of ground reality, what they accept from the librarians. This is not the first time that DCE is going for automation, in early 2008 there were similar efforts to automate college libraries, and they invested huge money at that time, why it has failed?


It seems that because of NAAC accreditation, DCE is emphasizing for automation of libraries, this effort is like putting the cart before the horse.

Tuesday 3 May 2011

Core Professional Competencies for Librarians

Continuing Professional Development is an essential part of the modern library information professional’s successful career planning & prospects. The LIS Professionals with better personal, professional and technological competencies have great opportunities and bright future in the modern libraries. Application of new ICT in to the libraries immediately requires improvement of different kinds of skills and knowledge in library information science professionals. Continuous staff training on emerging technologies is essential to learn, improve and develop various kinds of professional skills, knowledge and competencies. Professional competencies can be thought of as flexible knowledge and skills that allow the librarian to function in a variety of environments and to produce a continuum of value-added, customized information services that cannot be easily duplicated by others. They relate to the librarian’s knowledge in the areas of information resources, information access, technology, management and research, and the ability to use these areas of knowledge as a basis for providing library and information services. The technology is complex and librarians have not developed the skills to understand it, exploit it or create it. Those few who do have such skills find they have a very marketable commodity and can make a better living elsewhere. There is an urgent necessity to learn a great variety of professional competencies to accomplish the role of professional librarian in the constantly changing challenging web environment. Professional competences enable librarians to respond effectively and efficiently to the constant development of new technologies. Some of the unique competencies of the LIS Professionals are discussed in the following sections.

1. Technical Skills

In the age of 21st centaury LIS Professional must be aware of emerging technologies. It has become increasingly important that librarians keep up with technology and have certain basic skills. In the current scenario library professional must have the knowledge of HTML, Networking, scripting languages, the ability to deal with the back-end of the OPAC, the ability to translate library services into the online medium, the ability to troubleshoot basic computer and printer problems, or just a good healthy knowledge of emerging technologies.

1.1 Online medium: LIS Professionals need to do so much online these days, way beyond basic catalog and database searching (which sure isn’t easy either). Librarians have to be able to use search engines and use them well. They need to be able to find quality online resources. They need to help patrons set up e-mail and teach basic Internet skills. They need to be able to troubleshoot problems users are having accessing online library resources, at least to the extent where they can figure out if the problem is on the library’s side or the user’s side.

1.2 Ability to troubleshoot new technologies: It is just a part of the good user service we provide in libraries. Most of the time when you are working in library our user facing problem I using the scanner, fix the printer, and troubleshoot any other technology problems they may be having. As we get new computers, printers, scanners, etc. then we will need to learn how to troubleshoot those. The key is just being able to have a decision-tree in your head of what to ask or try when there is a problem. Many librarians cannot troubleshoot this stuff. Most of the time when we troubleshoot any technical problem, we would just throw up an “out of order” sign because we just didn’t have enough computer knowledge to figure out what the problem was. It was really bad user service. Librarians should be able to play with the technologies in the library, to learn what problems commonly come up, and to fix them if necessary, because it is often our responsibility to fix them.

1.3 Ability to easily learn new technologies: Most of the time people comment that there are so many new technological things at the library that they can’t keep up. Whenever we intimated to use new gadget in library we always asked to IT team of that organization to send an expert to the library to teach library professional how to use it. The best way to play with that technology. It is hard to learn to use first time that when a user asking you to use it. Learning about new technology is definitely a skill. People need to learn how to learn about new technologies without having to ask other people for help all the time.

2. Time Management Skills

Time management refers to a range of skills, tools, and techniques used to manage time when accomplishing specific tasks, projects and goals. This set encompass a wide scope of activities, and these include planning, allocating, setting goals, delegation, analysis of time spent, monitoring, organizing, scheduling, and prioritizing. Initially time management referred to just business or work activities, but eventually the term broadened to include personal activities also.
As par fourth law of library science which is “save the time of users”. This also has become more important that librarian muse developed the time management skills. Because to provide better or effective services to our user time also a factor suppose if we do not provide a desired information to a user on its requires time so our whole effort to search that information would be useless if we could not provide their desired information on time. So library professional also need to developed time management skills also.

3. Presentation Skills

This is a huge one. LIS Professional must have highly effective presentation skills. Suppose when he wants to implement a new technology or service for Library clients firstly he must create a proposal for management he must show that what would be the consequence of this new technology which tool to use to train staff, market the service etc. he must show the role of that new technology in currently being used in libraries. he can develop & practice reader’s advisory skills to promote reading habit among all level of users. Through his presentation skills he can increase awareness of the role of libraries & librarians in promoting information literacy. For that he can use variety of presentation techniques to convey information to his users with different learning styles.

4. Communication Skills

Communication has a great importance in providing better services to users. He communicates the value of library service to decision makers, staff and users. When he provides information to the user he must communicate clearly and respectfully with customers and colleagues. Always Demonstrates active listening skills with customers and colleagues in his workplace. Communication is not only must be effective with users only but must have ability to negotiate effectively with publishers, customers, management & vendors.

5. Customer Service

Nowadays librarians must be customer oriented. He can demonstrate a sincere commitment to customer service. Always he must try to observe customer needs & try to provide their desired information on time. Through continual design & improve user oriented information products & competencies he can provide them better customer services. Always show them confidence & competence to deliver perfect customer services. 

6. Evaluation and Assessment Skills

LIS Professionals need to understand how any changes in the way the library provides services will affect all stakeholders. Sometimes he focuses on the needs of one group and ignores the fact that the changes that will benefit one group will not benefit another. With any change, librarians should create a list of all of the different stakeholders and actually discuss how it will affect each of them. When we say “stakeholders” we must mean not only our patrons but staff, IT, and administrators. If you implement a project that library staffs don’t support, the likelihood of success is poor. For that  continually analyzes, investigates and assesses the information service needs of the users & according to our stakeholders needs we can designs and deliver specialized value added information products and services. Time to time we can evaluates the outcomes of the use of library and information resources and services for which we can conducts research to find solutions to the identified information management problems.

7. Managerial skills

In managerial skills we include technical skills, human skills & conceptual skills. Technical skills involve process or technique knowledge and proficiency in a certain specialized field. These skills are more important for Librarian also because library professional also dealing with a huge no. of staff doing the organization’s work. The technical skill involves the Librarian’s understanding of the nature of job that people under him have to perform. Human Skills involve the ability to interact effectively with people. Librarian interacts and cooperates with employees & staff also. Because Librarian deal directly with people, this skill is crucial. Librarian with good human skills is bale to get best out of their people. Conceptual Skills involve the formulation of ideas, conceptualization about abstract and Complex situations levels. Conceptual skills refer to the ability of a Librarian to take a broad and farsighted view of the organization and its future, his ability to think in abstract, his ability to analyze the forces working in a situation, his creative and innovative ability and his ability to assess the environment and the changes taking place in it.. Thus, technical skill deals with things, human skills concerns people, and conceptual-skill has to do with ideas.

8. Knowledge of Policies, Procedures, Issues and Standards

  • Maintains current awareness of professional issues impacting libraries
  • Demonstrates knowledge of library policies, procedures and service standards

9. Knowledge of Information Sources & Services

  • Develop specialized subject knowledge about the purpose of the organization
  • Identify materials appropriate to customers’ requirements and their abilities
  • Expert knowledge in the content of information resources and ability to critically evaluate and filter them
  • Develop and deliver convenient, easily accessible and cost effective information services to the users (CCFR)

 

10. Commitment to Life-Long Learning

  • Take responsibility for the development of one’s own professional career
  • Remain knowledgeable in current events and technologies
  • Pursues learning opportunities, personally or through formal training
  • Flexible in adapting to new situations, systems, tools, environments
  • Anticipates accepts, adapts and manages change effectively

 

11. Other Skills

  • Marketing and promotion of library services
  • Project management skills
  • Digital rights management
  • Knowledge management skills

Source: Southernlibrarianship

Regards
Rajashekara GR

Five Myths About the 'Information Age"

Confusion about the nature of the so-called information age has led to a state of collective false consciousness. It's no one's fault but everyone's problem, because in trying to get our bearings in cyberspace, we often get things wrong, and the misconceptions spread so rapidly that they go unchallenged. Taken together, they constitute a font of proverbial nonwisdom. Five stand out:

1. "The book is dead." Wrong: More books are produced in print each year than in the previous year. One million new titles will appear worldwide in 2011. In one day in Britain—"Super Thursday," last October 1—800 new works were published. The latest figures for the United States cover only 2009, and they do not distinguish between new books and new editions of old books. But the total number, 288,355, suggests a healthy market, and the growth in 2010 and 2011 is likely to be much greater. Moreover, these figures, furnished by Bowker, do not include the explosion in the output of "nontraditional" books—a further 764,448 titles produced by self-publishing authors and "micro-niche" print-on-demand enterprises. And the book business is booming in developing countries like China and Brazil. However it is measured, the population of books is increasing, not decreasing, and certainly not dying.

2. "We have entered the information age." This announcement is usually intoned solemnly, as if information did not exist in other ages. But every age is an age of information, each in its own way and according to the media available at the time. No one would deny that the modes of communication are changing rapidly, perhaps as rapidly as in Gutenberg's day, but it is misleading to construe that change as unprecedented.

3. "All information is now available online." The absurdity of this claim is obvious to anyone who has ever done research in archives. Only a tiny fraction of archival material has ever been read, much less digitized. Most judicial decisions and legislation, both state and federal, have never appeared on the Web. The vast output of regulations and reports by public bodies remains largely inaccessible to the citizens it affects. Google estimates that 129,864,880 different books exist in the world, and it claims to have digitized 15 million of them—or about 12 percent. How will it close the gap while production continues to expand at a rate of a million new works a year? And how will information in nonprint formats make it online en masse? Half of all films made before 1940 have vanished. What percentage of current audiovisual ma­terial will survive, even in just a fleeting appearance on the Web? Despite the efforts to preserve the millions of messages exchanged by means of blogs, e-mail, and handheld devices, most of the daily flow of information disappears. Digital texts degrade far more easily than words printed on paper. Brewster Kahle, creator of the Internet Archive, calculated in 1997 that the average life of a URL was 44 days. Not only does most information not appear online, but most of the information that once did appear has probably been lost.

4. "Libraries are obsolete." Everywhere in the country librarians report that they have never had so many patrons. At Harvard, our reading rooms are full. The 85 branch libraries of the New York Public Library system are crammed with people. The libraries supply books, videos, and other materi­al as always, but they also are fulfilling new functions: access to information for small businesses, help with homework and afterschool activities for children, and employment information for job seekers (the disappearance of want ads in printed newspapers makes the library's online services crucial for the unemployed). Librarians are responding to the needs of their patrons in many new ways, notably by guiding them through the wilderness of cyberspace to relevant and reliable digital material. Libraries never were warehouses of books. While continuing to provide books in the future, they will function as nerve centers for communicating digitized information at the neighborhood level as well as on college campuses.

5. "The future is digital." True enough, but misleading. In 10, 20, or 50 years, the information environment will be overwhelmingly digital, but the prevalence of electronic communication does not mean that printed material will cease to be important. Research in the relatively new discipline of book history has demonstrated that new modes of communication do not displace old ones, at least not in the short run. Manuscript publishing actually expanded after Gutenberg and continued to thrive for the next three centuries. Radio did not destroy the newspaper; television did not kill radio; and the Internet did not make TV extinct. In each case, the information environment became richer and more complex. That is what we are experiencing in this crucial phase of transition to a dominantly digital ecology.

Source: http://chronicle.com/


Regards

Rajashekara GR

Monday 2 May 2011

Role of youth in fight against corruption .......

Dear Friends,

Corruption undermines democracy and the rule of law. It leads to violations of human rights. It erodes public trust in government. It can even kill—for example, when corrupt officials allow medicines to be tampered with, or when they accept bribes that enable terrorist acts to take place. It has adverse effects on the delivery of basic social services. It has a particularly harmful impact on the poor. Corruption could be most efficitively fought either by strengthening media and by enabling main-stream youth to take part in drive against corruption. Here , i will be focusing, basically on role of youth in fight against corruption.

First and foremost Youth should Vote out corrupt officials. Voting and getting in credible leaders will improve the the governance system from top. Youth should Organize for the dissemination of civic education on corruption , Act responsibly with integrity and not engage in corruption. It has been rightly said “how are you going to change the world if you can’t change youself . Youth should engage in work to be able to earn a living and become self reliant on their hard earned sweat instead of dreaming of making money by reaching to post which provide ample opportunity to make black money.

 
Youth drives should be encouraged. These drives and initiatives give youth a voice in speaking against corruption. Young people should unite against corruption ,Seek to understand it and guard each other against them .Youth are good exposure to Internet, and media. They can question tge authority using “right to information ” . you might be surprised to know that Government of India has an online Grievance forum at http://pgportal.gov.in/ . You can use this tool to highlight the problems faced while dealing with Government officials or departments like Passport Office, Electricity board, BSNL/MTNL, Railways etc.

Youth should be energetic and creative to mobilize and sensitize the general public. They could Enlighten the community on corruption through theatre and other means like add campaign. .Youth could be role models to the young and try try to change the thinking of the older generation. We have Indian-idol for singing ability , we have best dance partner , why can’t we have a youth model against corruption .Every youth should say no to corruption .

 
Youth must be involved in both the formulation and implementation of policy against corruption. Every the top institution like IITs, IIMs or schools have got every sort of club like quiz club, debate club , sport club , robotics club but you will hardly find an anti corruption club . so , what i suggest is that Anticorruption clubs should be formed in every learning institutions. There is an organization which is driving youth energy to fight against corruption under name “jagoo re “. I am sure you misght have seen it advertisement in television with tag line “ye khate hain kyun ki hum inhe khilate hai “. So youth should neither give or nor receive bribes.
Before i leave this stage (or you shift to next post , incase you have been reading it on a Blog ) , i have one last message for our youth – “Be aggressive, have courage to fight corruption. ” we can and we will make a better india , a nation free of corruption .

              Thank you.


Regards
Rajashekar