Dear Dr. Arunachalam You have really touched a very deep chord. We can no longer reject the truth that we are faced with - however bitter it is. I know I have talked about all these things to many people on one or more of these lists and definitely with the individuals cc-ed on this list. I am also aware that there are a handful of excellent dedicated librarians in India - but the number is dwindling alarmingly.Also - they are buried deep in their institutions and do not spread their wings across - mostly because they not permitted to. I am praying hard that the National Knowledge Commission's findings and reports may do some resurrection for the profession. There are two things about this entire issue: 1) There is a "Vicious Circle" that we are talking about. - Poor quality librarians (being produced in masses) ----> projecting the profession in a poor light ---> not attracting the kinds of salaries that MBAs / IT professionals or even next lower levels do ----> and thus no really good students enter the profession. I mentioned "Circle" and because I am writing in an email - I had to put down the entire thing in a linear fashion. The circle obviously has no beginning. One grim reality is - except in rare situations, the number of librarians who would send their children into this profession is miniscule. If we ourselves will not - how do we expect good candidates to come in? Today's scenario is that the average starting salary for a Fresh MBA from a reputed instn is Rs. 50,000/- and I wonder how many seniors in the LIS profession, take that much home at the fag end of their careers (if we leave aside some Corporate librarians) 2) Where do we begin? I believe there must be lots of parallel processing. a) Strong Foundations - School and college libraries need to be given very high importance. The focus must be - i) To inculcate the love of reading and information seeking in children / teenagers ii) To sow the seeds of the importance of libraries in their lives The former will make them good library users AND good educated individuals ; the latter will make them give the due importance to libraries - whatever position they may be in.........and importantly if they are in decision making positions b) At a very Massive Level - promote awareness of the importance of the profession - and make good students take it up. In a country of Dr. SRR, I think that easily 8-9/10 people to whom I say "I have done Lib & Info Sc" ask me if it is a Diploma after the 10th or 12th. This is something we need to be ashamed of. People know about BBA / BMS / BMM etc - courses that are all just a few years old, but how come they know practically nothing about Lib & Info Sciences? c) While we are getting good students in, we have to parallely ensure that they have good jobs with good starting salaries, when they graduate. There has to be some "handshake" between the process of these students getting trained and organizations taking them in and starting them on doing something by which they really produce measurable results in at least one year. Also importantly, Communication and Soft skills simply MUST be included in the curriculum. As I said - fundamentally - all three processes have to go on and then each feeds into the other. Finally - I guess - the real question is "WHO WILL BELL THE CAT"? Take all this to the major change that we seek? We need a bunch of people who will work tirelessly towards this - and not give up - and hand over the baton to the right people as and when required. Vasumathi Sriganesh Director, QMed Services A-3, Shubham Centre, Cardinal Gracious Road Chakala, Andheri East, Mumbai 400099, India Tel: 91-22-40054474 / 75 Fax: 91-22-40054358 Indian Medical Sites- www.qmedin.com/medsites ----- Original Message ----- From: "Subbiah Arunachalam" <subbiah_a@yahoo.com> To: <lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in>; <naglaxman@yahoo.com>; <iatlis-owner@yahoogroups.com> Cc: <haravu@newgenlib.com> Sent: Saturday, April 07, 2007 6:32 PM Subject: [LIS-Forum] Training in LIS
Friends:
I am concerned about the quality of training we provide in our country to would be librarians and information scientists.
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