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.