December 2008 - LIS-Forum - ncsi.iisc.ernet.in

Who Speaks for Librarians
by Charu 08 Dec '08

08 Dec '08

Respected Friends, In the line of discussion raised by worthy friends regarding some of issues are as follows-------- 1. Professional accreditation of librarians in society, 2. Quality of LIS Education at all level. 3. Time bound Professional as well as technical enhancement , 4. At par status in parent organisations, 5. Removal of Financial and Administrative disparities , 6. Change of image from CIRUCLATION CLERK to KNOWLEDGE GENRATOR, KNOWLEDGE MANAGER, INFORMATION OFFICER and so on , 7. Library Services are as precious , priceless and very much mandatory than any other service in the parent organisation/body, And this is not the end of issues at all. All of us as LIS Professionals are well aware of all these issues and the irony of fate is that we do have the answers also. But the million dollar question is that who speaks first? Mere discussion on different forums and in conferences does not give any concrete result. I think now the time has come that we all should stand up to change the nomenclature of LIS world. We should come forward and can ask the administrative machinery to change the various recommendations into authenticity. We have number of LIS Associations not only in India but across the globe. Numbers of scholars are there who can sail the ship in right direction for next generation. We have library legislation in 10 states , lucrative recomendations of Knowledge Commisons are also there to guard the LIS issues. So what we all are waiting for................ Regards, Miss Charu Mathur. Delhi. -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.

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How can we improve the status of the Librarians???
by Sree Kumar Nair 08 Dec '08

08 Dec '08

Dear Venkata, Many thanks for forwarding this. It is true, indeed, that Librarians are not getting the same status as lecturers and other professionals in the society. The problem is not with Institution but with the individual in itself. I have personally come across many professionals having MLIS or M.Phil but not up-to-mark. Why???? Is it the structure of the course or what they learn? It is very easy to get first class in LIS if you know the basic, but this basic does not help in LIS profession. What they have learnt during their course period - they are unable to utilize the same in their institution. For example how many candidates know to use DDC/Colon effectively and have a proper classification system in the Library. How many of us are good at giving proper user education??? There are many more such issues which cannot be discussed. If you notice many of them (I should not be calling them professionals) use either the Library of Congress Catalogue or British Library Integrated Catalogue to classify the books, which in my opinion - using these for classification of Indian books is misleading and inappropriate for arrangement of books in a library. My dear friend, Classification and Cataloguing is the essence of LIS and if you take them out anybody can be a Librarian. Communication is one aspect which needs to be thoroughly improved. Communication can be improved through regular reading and interacting with the users and not through starting a movement. Here, again, the individual has to take the initiative. I have also come across good Librarians and they are well placed in Asst. Professors grade. To be frank with you, they are really good in their work, in their ideology and have contributed towards the growth of the institution. Some of the Library Assistants are also well placed. There is a saying "*First Deserve and then Desire*". 'Deserve' is not only qualification but other aspects in an individual. I am of the opinion that with 5 - 7 years of work experience in a library will easily get him a lecturer's scale. My dear Venkata, if you notice, the Library Assistant's are paid in the grade of Rs.5500/-. The fact is that some Institutes take Library Assistant and call them Librarians and thus the Library Assistant feels that they are in Lecturer's grade. The Librarians are not teaching and *the ones who teach* obviously get a lecturer's/asst professors grade. Imagine the rigorous process which a *Library lecturer* has to undergo for a job in an institute. As a part of the interview process they have to teach a class in front of the higher authorities and then judged by students and faculty. Does this happen with non-teaching Librarian??? If you notice *all Post Graduates are not Lecturers*, they opt for different options and those who opt for lecturers/Asst Professor know the art of teaching. An institution cannot survive by taking lectures who do not know how to teach and those who know how to teach are paid the Lecturers/Asst Professors grade. But ironically, all PG in LIS wants Lecturers grade, the moment they join. I hope am able to give you a clear picture on this. With warm regards, Sree Kumar Nair. -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.

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Kind attention to INDEST members
by Ajay Kum Sharma 08 Dec '08

08 Dec '08

Dear INDEST Members, I would like to convey my message to all INDEST members through the LIS-Forum that I have left the INDEST Consortium and joined the Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan as Assistant Librarian since 30th June 2008. Still, I am getting the INDEST mails regularly and I am unable to give you the proper response in due time. You can expect the quick response if you send your mail directly to the INDEST people at the given addess: *Prof. G P Agarwal *Acting Coordinator, INDEST-AICTE Consortium Central Library, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi Hauz Khas, New Delhi - 110 016 Phone: 011-2659 1451 (O) *OR* *Bibhuti Bhusan Sahoo* Assistant Librarian, Central Library INDEST-AICTE Consortium Indian Institute of Technology Delhi Hauz Khas, New Delhi - 110 016 E-mail: bibhuti(a)library.iitd.ac.in, indest(a)library.iitd.ac.in Phone: : 011-2659 1444 -- Thanks and regards. Ajay Kumar Sharma Assistant Librarian, Central Library, Visva Bharati, Santiniketan, Birbhum - 731235, W.B. Email: ajaysharma.lib(a)visva-bharati.ac.in Web: http://www.geocities.com/ajaysharma_lib/ *********************************************************** 1. Join today Digital Library Discussion Forum http://drtc.isibang.ac.in/dlrg 2. Join today LIS-Forum mailing list http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lis-forum -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.

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Nat. Symp. on OA & Building IRs: Corrected Date
by I.R.N.Goudar 08 Dec '08

08 Dec '08

Dear Professional Colleagues, PLEASE READ THE DATE AS 21-23 JANUARY AS THE DATE OF THIS SYMPOSIUM. However the brochure uploaded on Internet has correct date mentioned. Inconivinience caused is regretted. We at National Aerospace Laboratories have organised a three day "National Symposium on Open Access and Building Institutional Repositories (NSOABIR)" as a part of Golden Jubilee Celebrations of NAL. Date: 21-23 Jan 2009 at NAL, Bangalore. Venue: Dr. S R Valluri Auditorium/KTMD Seminar Hall National Aerospace Laboratories Bangalore Topics: Scholarly Communication, Open Access Movement/Initiative, OA Channels, OA Policies, Digitisation & Digital Preservation, Open Access Journals, Institutional Repositories, Setting up of IRs, Impact of OA on Citations/IF Value, IPR and Copyright issues, Librarian's Role in OA/IR, Case Studies. Resource Persons: Experts from DRTC/ISI, NCSI/IISc, NIMHANS, GEIT, Informatics India and NAL Panel Discussion: "Impact of Open Access on Science Communication" No of Participants: Restricted to 75 Registration Fees: Rs. 2000/- Accommodation: For few participants on first come first serve basis I invite you to make use of this opportunity for yourself or your colleagues. For more details Please See: www.icast.org.in/nsoabir.html Contact: Mrs. Poornima Narayana, Convener, NSOABIR Information Centre for Aerospace Science and Technology (ICAST) National Aerospace Laboratories Post Bag No. 1779, Bangalore-560 017 Tel: 080-25086080; 25086083 Fax: 080-25260862; 25270670 E-mail: poornima(a)nal.res.in Regards Goudar -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. I.R.N. Goudar Tel: 91-80-25086081 Sci G & Head, Information Centre for 91-80-25235315 Aerospace Science and Technology Fax: 91-80-25268072 National Aerospace Laboratories E-mail:goudar@css.nal.res.in Airport Road, BANGALORE-560 017 India http://www.icast.org.in/staff/goudar.html -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.

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How We can improve the status of Librarian
by pramod mangla 08 Dec '08

08 Dec '08

I have read the write-up very carefully. It is indeed important. Yes, you should start the movement and you would have my full support. Best wishes, Prof.P.B.Mangla -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.

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OpenMED@NIC
by Shriram Pandey 07 Dec '08

07 Dec '08

Dear Colleagues, OpenMED@NIC is an open access archive for Medical and Allied Sciences. Here authors / owners can self-archive their scientific and technical documents. For this they need to register once in order to obtain a user id in OpenMED@NIC system. However no registration is required for searching the archive or viewing the documents. OpenMED@NIC is a discipline based International Archive. It accepts [Revised policy - dated 28th March 2006] peer-reviewed documents having relevance to research in Medical and Allied Sciences including Bio-Medical, Medical Informatics, Dental, Nursing and Pharmaceutical Sciences. These could be peer-reviewed preprints, postprints (refereed journal paper) and accepted theses. In case of non-English documents, descriptive data [Author, Title, Source etc.], abstract and keywords must be in English. Submitted documents will be placed into the submission buffer and would become part of OpenMED@NIC archive on their acceptance. More information available at : http://openmed.nic.in/ Regards, Shri Ram Pandey - MLIS(BHU), IKM(IISc), UGC-NET (JRF) LNM Institute of Information Technology(LNM IIT) Jaipur(Rajasthan) -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.

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Open Library Project
by Shriram Pandey 07 Dec '08

07 Dec '08

Dear List Members, Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and is funded in part by a grant from the California State Library. They have a small team of fantastic programmers who have accomplished a lot, ! .This is an Open project - the software is open, the data is open, the documentation is open, and the site is open. For more information: http://openlibrary.org/ Regards, Shri Ram Pandey - MLIS(BHU), IKM(IISc), UGC-NET (JRF) LNM Institute of Information Technology(LNM IIT) Jaipur(Rajasthan) -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.

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Young Librarian suffering from blood cancer
by shankar Dhande 07 Dec '08

07 Dec '08

Young Librarian from Osmanabad district K. L Chappu suffering from blood cancer and admitted in J J hospital, Mumbai. The expenditure of hospital is beyond his financial capicity. All professionals are kindly requested to help him. He is admitteed in ward 12 , second floor, J.J. hospital. Report number cd-25007. Contact - Chappu 9420770878 his friend Pawan Sharma - 9421039142 Professionals from Mumbai may help him by visiting hospital. Even if u r knowning doctors from that hospital or if u are knowing the agencies for financial assistance, that will help him lot. Shankar Dhande Librarian IBMR Pune -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.

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Re: [LIS-Forum] Koha for Malyalam Catalogues
by Parthasarathi Mukhopadhyay 06 Dec '08

06 Dec '08

Dear Mr. K Rajasekharan It's good to see that you are trying hard to promote Indic script based automated and digital library system. Thanks a lot, I'm not alone in this endeavour. Let me tell you and other interested professioanls that a step-by-step guide has been developed by me for Bengali script based Koha in 2006. This peocess can be extended to any Indic script now (as TDIL developed required virtual keyboard, open type fonts etc; see http://ildc.gov.in/) Koha developer team included this methodology in their official manual and can be acccessed through link http://www.kohadocs.org/usersguide/apbs01.html. The final result of this methodoloy already published as a paper in IASLIC 2006 conference at Roorkee and available from LDL https://drtc.isibang.ac.in/bitstream/1849/409/1/open%20road_main_theme_psm_…. This paper shows Bengali script based interface of Koha (both user/opac and librarian/intranet), Search interface (simple/advance), ISBD display format of Bengali script based documents, ISO-2709 based export/import of Bengali script based documents. IFLA also reported this development in IFLA SET Bulletin July 2008 issue (see page 21). It can be accessed through http://www.ifla.org/VII/s23/bulletin/SET_Bulletin-Jul2008.pdf. Thanks and regards partha Dr. Parthasarathi Mukhopadhyay Department of Library and Information Science University of Burdwan, Burdwan, Rajbati - 713104, WB ----- Original Message ----- From: Rajan To: "Lis Forum" Subject: [LIS-Forum] Koha for Malyalam Catalogues Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2008 12:05:18 +0530 Dear All, Koha is a good choice for libraries in Kerala.But the possibility of using Koha for creating catalogue of Malayalam books (due to its Unicode compliance) has not been explored much because of poor knowledge of most of the librarians about Unicode, it seems.Dr P Mukhopadhyay ( University of Burdwan), a prominent practitioner of Koha, clarifies that Koha can be used for creating searchable catalogue of books in Malayalam, if we use utf-8 encoding for character set and the mysql supports utf-8 as native character set. Kindly inform me, if anyone is using Koha 2.2.9 on Windows for Malayalam catalogue preparation. Regards, K Rajasekharan Kerala Institute of Local Administration Thrissur -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. _______________________________________________ LIS-Forum mailing list LIS-Forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lis-forum -- _______________________________________________ Search for products and services at: http://search.mail.com -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.

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How we can improve status of Librarian professionals?
by S K DEsale 06 Dec '08

06 Dec '08

Dear all, Many of you will agree on the fact that Librarians are not getting the same status as lecturers and other professionals in society. Since we all pusses same qualifications, same working conditions, pay scales etc. we deserve the same status which these other professionals enjoying. If we just take the example of our LIS teaching faculty, they are also treated differently than librarians. I think this is not fair. Librarians should be considered as a faculty and should be given the same rights given to the teachers. Librarian should have right to represent in board of studied of LIS, he should be given a right to vote and choose his representatives in the board. Since librarian is a person who is actually working in the library he knows what knowledge one should pusses to be successful in LIS profession & what should be taught to new entrants. Library professionals also should demand separate faculty like other professions e.g. Law, architect, Management, Medical etc. LIS should have its own dean who will represent us at higher level so that we can able to take our profession forward. These are few things if we able achieve then I am sure it will make lot of difference in our status in the society. We are planing to start one movement to achive this, I want to know your opinion and views on that. With regard Mr. S. K. Desale Asst. Librarian Jayakar Library University of Pune -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.

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