Terming libraries as education resource centres, the Joint Secretary of University Grants Commission G. Srinivas stressed on the need for librarians to reach out to readers through web-technology.
Librarians must disseminate scholarly information from available print and web resources, adapting themselves to the system of distributed learning, Dr. Srinivas said, inaugurating a two-day workshop on ‘Scholarly Information Access’ organised by the Bharathidasan University Library, on Friday.
Scholarly information access primarily means providing right information, be it from printed or electronic books, he said, and urged libraries to be student-centric by concentrating on need-based books and ensure capacity utilisation, alongside fulfilling the requirements of faculties and research scholars. Dr. Srinivas visualised a scenario of libraries functioning as centres of learning with access to web sources alone, and called upon librarians to adapt themselves well to the distributed learning system.
Presiding over, the Vice-Chancellor M. Ponnavaikko observed that through providing access to vast information and knowledge, web technology has now made the task of research scholars easy. The purpose of research was to obtain facts in the form of scholarly information, which, he said, will be authentic when sourced from refereed journals with high impact factor. He felt students and research scholars can make the most of the system of access to e-journals by subscribing through forming associations in order to enjoy the benefit of subsidies. Prof. Ponnavaikko was in favour of networks of libraries making available open access resources in the net free of cost or at low cost.
Delivering the key note address, P.V. Konnur, Librarian and Head, IT, Bangalore University, focussed on human relations on the part of librarians as a means to infuse vibrancy into functioning of libraries. Information Technology can only be a tool, he felt, observing that the peripheral information harnessed from search-engines will not suffice. Faculties need to deliver healthy material. Research scholars, he said, must obtain scholarly information with the help of librarians on the developments so far in their areas of research, before proceeding further with their research.
The Workshop Coordinator and Chief Librarian S. Srinivasa Raghavan said, users’ suggestions were being taken to customise the products to their requirements.
