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April 15, 2007
Backtalk
Books and their keepers
This is with reference to the article titled “Books and their keepers” (March 25, 2007). The writer has drawn a poor sketch of library education in Pakistan while criticising it completely. Being a student of the Department of Library and Information Science, I do not agree with the opinions of the writer.
The fact of the matter is that students mostly enroll in the Library Science Department because they want to. Perhaps a few students choose put it down as their second and third choices as per the policy of Karachi University. Presently, the working librarians studying with me show the same interest in the subject as anyone else would. Hence, I disagree with the writer that students today are not fit to study library sciences.
We study the most advanced courses as per the Higher Education Comission’s (HEC) recommendation and they are at par with international standards. We study things like digital libraries, electronic information sources, information storage processing and retrieval and networking.
Out of the nine faculty members of our department, one has a PhD, another is in the process of acquiring it and there is yet another person who has submitted his synopsis for an MPhil. This shows teachers are still engaging in research.
The teaching methodology and class atmosphere is pretty good. Lectures are mostly run through a multimedia discussion forum and students are provided an opportunity to participate in these discussions. Students are also assigned case studies of different well-known libraries where they physically carry out visits, and get the required information and gain practical experience. Furthermore, students are given theses related to the current trends and international information and retrieval standard.
The writer’s take on computer labs is baseless as this department has a well-equipped laboratory to meet the needs of the students. Training and practical classes are carried out on international standard software like WIN SISI, GENISIS and other databases. The training and application of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) used for the generation of bar codes for library materials and automation is also taught to us.
I hope my comments will help the writer see both sides of the picture.
Muhammad Yousuf Ali Department of Library & Information Science
University of Karachi
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