Replies to This Forum

Permalink Reply by Siddhartha Shankar Ray on April 6, 2016 at 7:16

Dear Ms. Sadhana Mishra,

Thanks for your post and for addressing a quite pertinent issue. As I understand, UGC has no such rules/mandates for any honourary Librarians but often the College Authority takes in such people (mostly retired) for advising for the development of their libraries.Additionally, it is often observed that for govt. funded colleges, it takes a considerable time to recruit a new librarian after retirement/death/resignation of the librarian and for the NAAC/UGC inspection, they urgently require the service of a Seasoned library professional free of cost/at minimal cost.

Besides, quite occasionally though, if the authority feels that the existing librarian is not competent enough or lacks initiative, they ask for a honourary librarian at the least cost. and never-the-less, sometimes, the authority becomes so convinced with the activities of their retiring librarians, that they want to retain him/her for the interest of the institutions.

You can well understand that for each of the cases the roles of such HLs are,sort some different, however, in most cases their roles are like those of Advisors/Consultants.

Sometimes, they become mentors for the newly recruited young librarians while sometimes they become most unwelcome for the existing librarians.
Sincerely,

Siddhartha Shankar Ray

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Sadhana Misra on April 6, 2016 at 18:10

Dear Sir,
Thankyou so much for an eye opening explanation. Basically honrary Librarians in colleges are usually the teaching staff with practically no knowledge of LIS and they govern the Librarians who are Head of Library and have updated knowledge of LIS. Apart from this Librarians are now academic staff then under what UGC rule they govern the Librarians. In fact the library committee is also supposed to be advisory in nature then how honrary Librarians opt to become mentors.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Siddhartha Shankar Ray on April 6, 2016 at 19:29

Many thanks Ms. Mishra for your feedback post.

Induction of academic staff in Libraries and in administration is a trend in academic institutes.

It is form of "intellectual hegemony" adopted by the academic community so that they can CONTROL EVERYTHING!

In Universities you can often come across non professional Officer-In-Charges in Libraries.

In a central University in West Bengal, a professor of a foreign language dept was made chief of the Library as OIC, Library for several years while all the works were done by the then Dy. Librarian and never-the-less, the OIC was exempted from responsibility that means the Dy. Librarian had to take entire responsibilities of any sort of library related matters/issues!!

It is known and an open fact that in a very well known National Scientific Body, the basically non-productive Scientists are made "Scientist-In Charge" of libraries. The intrinsic idea is to provide salvation to NON PERFORMING ASSETS of the academic institutes. (It is an open  fact that a competent professor having several Research Scholars or a very competent College Teacher who remains engaged with academic activities are never given such jobs. Only those who are incapable are singled out to do such jobs).

Since librarians are minorities in such institutes, they often become victims.

However, to conclude, in spite of all said, there is no denying that there are a section of useless librarians who are mostly interested in various OTHER activities EXCEPT Library jobs and in those cases, authority finds no way out but to acquire a non-professional academic staff to tide over the situation.

Sincerely,

Siddhartha Shankar Ray

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Sadhana Misra on April 6, 2016 at 19:55

Dear Sir,
I do agree to what you say but for all these short comings why and how long the hard working section of Librarians, who really want to genuinely do a lot for their library and In turn for the field of LIS, should suffer. It's a sad state of affair where genuine professionals are loosing their interest.

• ▶ Reply