People can access worldwide databases through digital library and librarians can help them obtain useful information.
ISLAMABAD: Those days are gone when librarians would sit in a room full of books and would be asked by library users to help with locating materials that the latter needed. In today’s era, librarians have become more like information specialists and generalists. In fact, the nature of libraries, even in Pakistan, is truly changing, especially since many of them have multimedia collections and resource, and the trend is increasing. The world has truly become a global village due to modern technologies and even social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter can be of much use for librarians.
The role of the Higher Education Commission’s Digital Library is a crucial one. People can access worldwide databases through it and librarians can help them obtain useful information. Coupled with this is the increasing trend among many people not to visit libraries physically, and utilising digital and online services offered by them to download/access the materials that they need.
Because of the changing nature of the librarian, a new word has been coined and it is ‘cybrarian’, taking into account the increasingly IT-linked nature of the job. An expert says that a cybrarian “is a person who integrates and infuses, and injects internet technology into education…. The Cybrarian is community oriented, which means the Cybrarian helps families, business, and government integrate the internet into the educational environment in a coordinated effort”.
The problem is that in Pakistan most of the time librarians are seen as nothing more than clerks — and this couldn’t be further from the truth. To make matters worse, governments have hardly done anything to improve the general standard of library professionals in the country. The curriculum taught at library schools is not regularly updated and there is no uniformity in scale as far as library professionals are concerned. In this, I would say that the provincial education ministries can play a crucial role because they have the resources needed to train library professionals in much-needed skills related to management, technology and communications.
The government is requested to pay attention to this neglected profession.
Abid Hussain
Assistant Library Officer
National Defence University
Published in The Express Tribune, June 29th, 2014.
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