In this book, the author points out that consequent upon the emergence of diverse types of libraries the school, college, university, special, adult public and juvenile public libraries–the librarian, today, may be called upon to manage any of these categories of libraries. Although all these are concerned with dissemination of information, the function of the librarian differs from category to category to category, in accordance with the requirements of the clientele of each of these types. He is, thus, a multifaceted professional person. The librarian, therefore, is not just a manager of libraries as he had been hitherto. He is an educator, facilitator, appraiser, mentor, confidant, guide and above all a social worker. Of course, to carry out these tasks, he ought to be an exert in library techniques like classification, cataloguing, and preparation of bibliography to which has to be added information science, a new technique that has been introduced recently to enhance the efficacy of library service. The author discusses in detail what the librarian is expected to do in each of these capacities. This book, therefore, is a must not only for working librarians but also for students of library and information science.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR V M Mohanraj
After a short stint of teaching as Demonstrator in Biology in the Arts College, Chennai, V.M. Mohanraj took up librarianship. And qualifying himself in the profession at the Madras University in 1951, he joined the Presidency College, Chennai, in 1955, as Additional Librarian and in 1959, got transferred as Chief Librarian to the Law College, Chennai. Thanks to the constraints of government service, he resigned from there to join The Lawrence School, Lovedale, a Public School, as Librarian and superannuated in 1989. The congenial atmosphere provided by the school helped him carry out many studies in various aspects of general reading of schoolchildren, the findings of which were published in the Herald of Library Science, Journal of Indian Education (NCERT) and Primary Teacher (NCERT). Besides publishing many papers on different topics pertaining school library organization and service in various other periodicals he has written a book, The School Library, published by the Kerala State Institute of Languages, Thiruvananthapuram, the first one on school library service to appear in Malayalam. A freelance writer, he has to his credit, five other books in Malayalam and articles in English and Malayam on various other topics. He had presented papers at many seminars on school library services and had visited myriad libraries in various states in the US to observe their working. Brief biographical sketches of his appear in the Who's Who of Today's Writers, brought out by the Kerala Sahitya Adademic, Trissur and a few other publishers.
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