IGNOU hosts Capacity Building Programme for Public Library Professionals under the National Mission on Libraries (NML)
28 March, 2018IGNOU organized a week-long capacity building programme for library personnel from various public libraries of the country under the National Mission on Libraries (NML). One of the four major components under the mission is capacity building. Other Components include: creation of National Virtual Library of India (NVLI), setting up of NML model libraries throughout the country and survey of libraries. Raja Rammohun Roy Foundation is the nodal agency of NML for administration, logistics, planning and budgeting purposes under the Ministry of Culture and is mandated to conduct training programme for the public library personnel throughout the country.
This was second of such program organized by IGNOU with Raja Rammohun Roy Library Foundation and the Ministry of Culture, Government of India and is tenth in the series. The objective of the programme was to orient the public library personnel on the latest developments in Library and Information Sciences and enhance the professional competence.
Welcoming the participants at the workshop, Prof Uma Kanjilal, Director, Inter University Consortium of Technology Enabled Flexible Education (IUC- TEFED) said that it is matter of pride for the university to have hosted the second capacity building programme within a span of a year. She added that such programmes help in imparting necessary training to the library personnel so to better serve the public. The knowledge locked in books is of no help if it does not reach the readers and if they cannot access. So it is imperative that existing public libraries become repository of digital resources with open platforms which have multilingual federated search interfaces to be accessible to everyone with ease, said Prof Kanjilal stressing the role of ICT.
Prof S. B. Arora, VC IGNOU had words of praise for the programme as he said that such initiatives are much needed to help make India a knowledge driven society. He also emphasized that with mobile and Internet technology being adopted everywhere the delivery of knowledge or information should be through digital means and technology should be used as an enabler to help the general public.
Prof Deepak B. Phatak from IIT-Bombay Lead PI of the NVLI project also made a presentation on the progress of development of NVLI in collaboration with IGNOU and CDAC, Pune. Prof Phatak informed that the cloud space of 3 Petabytes have been made available for hosting of NVLI. He also outlined various parts of the initiative being undertaken by different institutions including IGNOU which has been entrusted to meta-tag the records for making each resource searchable with the click of mouse.
