Librarians must interact with researchers much more than they

Fellow Academic and research Librarians, All of us know our work is not confined to what we do with inanimate objects - books, reports, online content, managing our budgets to get the maximum benefit to our clients/users, and so on. The most important part of any, especially an academic/research, library is not these physical things and not even efficient management of the scarce resources allotted to the library. It is people as Washington State University's business librarian Gabriella Reznowski would tell you. See how in partnership with Assistant professor Amrita Lahiri, Ms Reznowski helped Lahiri's entrepreneurial management class complete their term project in which they pick a research question focused on entrepreneurship and conduct a survey of the literature relevant to their question. They interview entrepreneurs and use databases such as Pitchbook and Statista to find answers.Dr Lahiri considers the university's libraries to be a critical ally in pursuing this objective. Please see https://news.wsu.edu/news/2024/05/16/carson-colleges-amrita-lahiri-named-rec... . The question for us in India is how often do we see such active collaboration between faculty and librarians even in the best of our higher educational institutions? Saying that in the Internet era researchers have direct access to the info they need through their laptops is not good enough. How many of us know the current questions our professors and students are investigating? How often do we meet them and discuss their information needs? I have had the privilege of knowing a few librarians who excelled in serving their academic clients beyond their expectations. I will only name two of them: Mr V Sarangan, who came from Salem in Tamil Nadu with a Third class BA and a basic diploma/degree in library science to join as a technical assistant in the CSIR headquarter's library in New Delhi. His lowly status notwithstanding he did a marvellous jof. He knew which officer, be it the Director General or Head of Planning or Manpower division, would benefit by reading which latest arrivals from among the books, reports, journal articles, etc. Then there was Ratnakar, now retired, of the Raman Research Institute, who knew the research interests of virtually every researcher in the campus from the Director down to the freshly recruited research student. I have benefited much from both of them although I was not working in the same institution. I would like to hear such positive examples from the current crop of librarians. With best wishes, Subbiah Arunachalam http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4398-4658
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Subbiah Arunachalam