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Permalink Reply by Siddhartha Shankar Ray on August 9, 2015 at 20:57

Dear Sri Ayush Bengani,

Thanks for your post and for an idealistic philosophy (which is ABSOLUTELY CORRECT indeed!!) But I am afraid, the prevailing situation is too far from it. Please do not take my views as sort of adverse or negative comments.I honour and openly admire your outlook. However, as I personally believe, we must adhere to stark reality otherwise we are certain to get a severe shock and all our ideologies may be shattered!!. I am writing it from my experience.I

Anyway, coming to the context of your post, do you SERIOUSLY believe that barring a very very few & extremely rare exceptions our UGC Sponsored Colleges or AICTE approved institutions do really care for advancement of Library services  unless they are compelled to do some thing to retain their approval from the competent authorities. As I understand, had they thought of such things, and acted accordingly voluntarily,  there would not have been hue & cries for visits by the NAAC &/or AICTE teams. Hd there been no requirement of API & PHDs for career advancements, do you really believe that the teachers & Librarians ever been so up and doing in publishing papers or doing Ph.Ds? Do you really believe that there had been no mushrooming of ISSN assigned periodical overnight while most of them are pathetically below standard??

The technological changes are that the teachers are spared from writing class note afresh every year; they have just cut, copy & paste requisite portion of texts to the soft copies of their notes in their laptops (which, in many case, were received free from the College authorities on the basis of financial allocations & recommendations from the NAAC!! )

For modernization, the exercise adopted for majority of private institutes are to switchover to e-books and e-journals. I have every doubt to what extent they are really devoted to the theme of modernization or user friendliness or whether the entire exercise is to cut short the expenditure involved!! I am not at all advocating on in favour of traditional /orthodox practices in Library service but in real sense, as I suspect ( I shall be really pleased if it proves to be untrue!) the reality is to save expenditure primarily while  users' convenience is mostly secondary.

Talking about user-friendliness, let me tell you that I have done a small survey with researchers of diverse age groups (ranging from mid 20's to mid 60's) and as i see the statistics more than 67.8% opined that they prefer hard copies for reading! The young generation who are spectacularly tech savvy, had 51.65% response for printed books!!

Regarding investment, It is certainly a major factor. At definite interval of time, you have to change the  entire system altogether which many institutes can not afford. But to keep pace with the modernizations one must have to adopt with it. We see it in our personal life as well. How many of us are still lingering with Cell phones without having the so called "apps" facilities? Even I felt an urgent necessity of buying one of those!!

So you see that certainly technologies have made some important changes and people adopted them out of sheer necessity while some had to accept them for cost effectiveness as well.

Sincerely,

Siddhjartha S. Ray, Calcutta

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Permalink Reply by LIBRARIAN on August 9, 2015 at 22:57

Thank you Sir , for sharing your experienced views . Indeed I agree with your points . The concern is there have been many individuals taking initiatives in individual sense ,but the need of the hour is to create impact and take initiatives as a collective group .

These days , yes decent budgets are allotted for libraries to automate . Looking at this Librarians look for prospective solutions but when the actual decision making is concerned , its later stretched so much that librarians loose hope , and continue to function manually .
This is something that make us think , that why Libraries are not given importance and priorities in many Institutes .


With Best Regards,
Aayush Bengani

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