Computer @ Libraries

This book is organized in 6 parts and 25 chapters. The first part ‘state of the art’ deals with diverse aspects of the profession. This part of the book talks about the relevance of Ranganathan in the digital era, the treads of job opportunities in the library profession which many ordinary students wish to pursue as a panacea to earn their livelihood, quality auditing of our libraries on the lines of the nationwide procedure adopted in US, managing knowledge and information management, the possibilities and dangers in managing knowledge. the technology is there to conduct e-learning library science but what is lacking is pragmatic application and a change in the mindset, what needs to be done to preserve the intellectual output of developing countries with an illustration of superconductivity literature. The second part of the book covers two aspects of book acquisition, we have come a long way from just buying books to collection development and electronically enabling book collection and their access, author then talks about the futility of hanging to unilateral regimes like the present GOC which totally bypasses the diverse membership it accommodated once. Part three throws light on IT enabling public libraries, information support for rural development and National Library. Libraries and librarians have to deal with electronic contents in wide variety and more quantity these days and that is the subject matter of Part four. Topics talked about in this section are: the different resources available in very potential and highly active area like Bioinformatics. Librarians through ages tried to provide client centred information services and the emerging computer and information technology provide effective tools and techniques to realize this, how education and learning could be made fun by combining media, web and information technology, the different licensing models libraries have to hear with for accessing electronic contents and the need to counter the repacking trends adopted by publishers, need for more active strategies to lure back users to libraries because the electronic environment alienates many of them from the portals of the library. Part five encompasses different facets of computer applications in libraries. This part is a tutorial on database management systems with some examples from the library domain and databanks, dBase implementation for creating a system for managing inventory of consumables and other items in an information center or library. Web mails democratized email applications to a great extent and some discussion about this widely used tool is represented. Part six is about the ‘big bang’ in library science, digital libraries. It discusses how to build digital libraries in a pragmatic way, the most important ingredient for digital libraries, content, which are aplenty in developing countries. Archieving digital contents is the next step in maintaining digital libraries which also finds references then the book discusses the difficulties libraries and librarians have to overcome before jumping into the bandwagon.