LIS Library Closure?

Library Journal December issue mentions that the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign officials had recommended closing the school’s physical LIS library, citing low usage, shift to electronic sources and other factors. It seems that library school libraries are also facing the closure like public libraries and some of the corporate libraries. However, this plan met with some resistance as Caroline M. Nappo, a PhD student of Library school circulated a petition to save the space.

SLA Asian Chapter's ICoASL 2008

I attended SLA Asian chapter's conference ICoASL at Delhi. It was a welcoming change to see that each speaker got minimum of 10 minutes to present their paper. They had two parallel sessions. Very few library conferences in India allow paper presenter to spend 10 minutes. Depend on chair person of the session, some speakers even got more than 15 minutes.

Also, SLA folks came to the conference and organized membership drive in Indian rupees. I was told over 30 new members joined. I think SLA is trying to be global in their membership. As a member once can attend atleast one free onlin learning program every month through their Click University. It helps library professionals continuously learn new things. I wish Indian association do arrange such things.

Proliferation of Library Conferences in India

I wonder now a days why everyone is organizing either national or international library conferences in India and from where people are attending? One can see at least one conference is getting organized in some part of the country every month. Sometimes, articles presented in these conferences are not of good quality and even the conference sessions are below average in content.

If organizers don't take enough care in managing the conference, one can see what happens from the last week's example of ILA conference organized at Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Mumbai Mirror newspaper dated 14th Nov 2008 described ILA conference as sleep-inducing International Conference on Libraries while talking about Orient BlackSwan's free distribution of English guides at the conference. You can read this article at www.mumbaimirror.com story titled "Q for ABC".

Hope other library conference organizers noticed this and are taking enough precautions for not to attract such bad publicity.

Research in Library and Information Science in India

Last Friday, I had attended a lecture at local library. The talk was delivered by a Professor from one of the leading Library Science school of Bangalore. Topic was "Research Opportunities in Library Science". Part of the lecture, the speaker commented about two aspects of Indian Library Science research - 1) too many survey based or citation analysis based research topics and majority of them that too with similar themes 2) Plagiarism. I am not surprised to hear about this. Indeed, couple of Professors with whom I interacted in the past echoed similar views. I am not sure whether they are making any efforts to reduce such research by educating their students.

One issue I can think of are job related opportunities and necessary qualifications in the academic field. This is encouraging lot of part-time researchers to opt topics that are easier and obviously survey or citation based topics. Indeed, some of the library departments are in unannounced number race to produce PhDs. Things only will change if library schools encourage research scholars to focus on utility based research.

First blog post

I was planning to launch this blog for last couple of months. Work and other things delayed this. SLA's 23 Things made me finally to start this blog "libcomment". I am planning to add at least one post every week. Your comments are always welcome.

I started reading a new book called The Numerati by Stephen Baker.This book profiles how different companies are employing mathematical modeling, statistical analysis of huge data from different fields and predicting various things. e.g, Amazon's book recommendation based on customer preferences, display of different ads by websites to different visitors and so on.

Btb, SLA Asian Chapter is organizing ICoASL 2008 (International Conference of Asian Special Libraries (ICoASL 2008) On Shaping the future of special libraries: beyond boundaries) on 26-28 Nov 2008 in New Delhi, India. See you some of you there.