Professionalism and Research in Library and Information Science

From the preface: "The Library and Information (LIS) practitioners have been viewing the subject of ‘professionalism in librarianship’ in three different angles. A larger section is, no doubt, ready to sing same tune of Mirium Drake, Dean & Director of Libraries, Georgia Institute of Technology, who emphatically recorded. Librarianship is one of the world’s oldest and most successful professions. It has survived war, plague, economic depression, and varying social values and conditions. The profession has shown an extraordinary ability to adapt to changing social and economic conditions and to adapt changing technologies to serve a variety of people with divese interests and need:(48). To some section, again, librarianship though fulfils the prerequisites of modern profession, has yet to gain the desired recognition from the society. And, another section has argued that librarianship has yet not attained the status of profession, though, it is moving towards professionalism. It is however a fact that the society, particularly in India, has little respect about librarianship. Even "the academics in the Universities and research institutions think that librarians earn easy money, and the layman wonder what the librarians do at all, other than stamping due dates and collecting fines"(62). An attempt has been made to record all these issues in the present book. Views expressed by the LIS professionals here and there about professionalism in librarianship and related areas are collected and consolidated in a systematic pattern. A study on a number of foreign and Indian LIS literature has been made for this purpose. The readers may agree or disagree with the expressions presented but the issues can not be ignored particularly at the present environment and also for the future course of librarianship.