Saturday, August 24, 2013

Celebration of Librarians’ Day at WeSchool, Mumbai,
13th August 2013.

The Learning Resource Centre at Welingkar Institute of Management Development and Research (We School), Mumbai organized a one day event titled “Celebration of Librarians’ Day” on Tuesday, 13th August 2013. The celebration saw 60 librarians from different institutions, organizations and corporates across the board, gathering in the portals of WeSchool, a leading B School in the country.

The event was inaugurated at the hands of  Prof. Dr. Uday Salunkhe, Group Director, WeSchool with  Prof. Harsha Parekh,HOD and Librarian(Retd), SNDT, B.P. Prakash, Global Head, Information Resources Centre, TCS and Dr. Venkadesan, Director,  Learning Resource Centre, ISB who joined him in lighting the auspicious lamp.
While delivering the keynote address Prof. Dr. Uday Salunkhe said,"We are really happy to be to celebrate the spirit of librarianship. The main aim here was to discuss the need to convert libraries into futuristic knowledge centers, with the ability to add value to the education system through relevant TLPs”

Harsha Parekh spoke about the relevance of fives laws of Library Science in the digital age, making it quite interesting and apt for the occasion. B.P. Prakash talked about the emerging trends in corporate libraries and how they are creating an impact on the ever so busy and yet demanding employees from the corporate world.
Dr. S Venkadesan in his speech focused on how traditional libraries are becoming Learning Resource Centers to cope with the needs of Gen Y  and how they should strive to become an inspiring learning environment for meet the expectations of the young students.

The  concept of  shelf-less Libraries   and  how digital content is adding value to the teaching and  learning process in the education, research and corporates was emphasized by  N.V. Sathyanaryana, Chairman and MD, Informatics (India) Ltd, Bangalore and M.K. Chettiar, CEO, Bharat Book Bureau, in his talk focused on the role of intermediaries in building e-resources in current scenario.

The deliberations were followed by a special session, Anchored by Dr Medha Joshi, HOD, Library and Information Services, Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai where   participating librarians  had the stage to themselves to share their best practices in LIS.  The  librarians shared what they had implemented as best practices in their libraries under seven different themes like Library Collaboration, IPR and Digtial Rights Management, Innovations in Marketing Library Services, E-Resources, Library as a Social Space, Collection Development and Capacity Building to meet Customer Needs through library Services  The highlight of this session  was the innovative group discussion where the participating librarians were split into seven teams to deliberate on the above themes to come out with what could be the best practices that can be adopted by the libraries to connect  well with the tech- savvy users, put the library resources to their optimum use and increase the number of  footfalls in the libraries.

This session was moderated by Mrs. Sushma Karnik, Director, American Center Library, Mumbai, Dr. S.K. Savanur, Sr. Faculty, Bedekar College, Thane  and  Dr. S. Venkadesan.

During the Open House Session, the participants were actively engaged in asking many questions related to the problems faced by them and on improving the work scenarios in their libraries to deliver quality service to their users. 

This session was moderated by Venkata Kesavan, Dy General Management, TAKC, TOI Group, Mumbai who was joined by  Vasumathi Sriganesh, CEO, QMed Knowledge Foundation, Mumbai and Kishore Ingale, IRC, TCS, Pune.
Giridhar Kunkur, Librarian, We School, Mumbai, who took the lead in organizing this event, proposed the Vote of Thanks. But as it rightly said that, as every story ends a new one begins ;  based on the deliberations and inputs provided by the librarians, the LRC team at WeSchool is busy preparing a list of the best practices that could be adapted by  libraries  in order to improve the performances of the libraries in this overwhelming digital environment.







By  Giridhar Kunkur
Librarian
Welingkar Institute of Management Development & Research Mumbai.
giridhar.kunkur@welingkar.org

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