Library Science Essay

With the rapid development of technology, constraints of economy and changing expectations about intellectual property rights, the HS librarian has to forcefully demonstrate the value of his / her contributions to their institutions. Addressing client information needs and thereby performing the scientific communication activities are the primary responsibilities of a librarian, who is known today as a â€Å"knowledge worker†. An effective leader in an academic HS library will constantly be engaged in activities which continually educate their staff ,re-engineer their programs and re-design products and services to meet the modern challenges of client information requirements through retrieval , creation , manipulation, management and dissemination of new knowledge. To be effective, the HS librarian has to be a viable participant in scientific communication. As a director of a HS library, my mantras would be â€Å"transformation,† â€Å"restructuring,† or â€Å"re-engineering† – the ones used by deans and other strategic planners on their campuses. I would strive to prove the value of the HS library to the institution through evaluative data and cost/benefit analyses by employing self assessment techniques. I would play a proactive role in introducing and integrating technologies into the communication process. I would act as an agent for the information seeker by gathering published information, seeking new sources, weighing responses, consulting on the design of personal databases, and packaging results into customized products. I would also join teams of clinicians or researchers to provide on-site consultation and delivery of information services or teaching the use of information management techniques and technologies in classrooms, labs, and offices. I would acquire new computational skills, deeper understanding of the information needs in subject disciplines, and expertise about the management of knowledge in distributed technology-intensive environments . The six types of library budgets are 1) Lump sum – refers to the allocation of a lump sum amount as resources to the library. This allocation is done by the top management of the parent organization.. 2) Formula – budget is one which is typically tied to a numeric value such as full-time-equivalencies (FTEs), i. e. , number of FTEs registered students multiplied by a fixed dollar amount yields the budget for the library. 3) Line Item – The line-item budget represents the most commonly used budgeting method for special libraries (Warner 9). In a line-item budget, each category of activity is afforded its separate appearance ( eg salaries, etc. ) 4) Program –a program budget focuses on the services the library provides to its clients and is an extension of the line item type of budget. 5) Performance Based – Performance budgets share characteristics with program budgets, but performance budgets focus primarily on what library staff members do or what functions they perform in the library’s service complement. 6) Zero Based – Zero-based budgeting requires that a â€Å"clean slate† be the starting point for budget development. Budget affects special libraries in much the same way as budgets affect any organization, including the parent organization of the special library. Therefore, given a choice, I would opt for a program budget as it relates to overall organizational goals and objectives and is very useful in establishing priority for library programs relative to the parent organization blend of the line item Training of the personnel is the most challenging personnel management issue. The challenge would be to keep all the â€Å"knowledge workers† motivated enough to keep themselves updated in all the relevant knowledge areas, so that they acquire an expertise in facilitating access to information, and also assembling the means for getting it. Building a team which will be constantly finding and/or building tools for managing knowledge, evaluating new products in light of their clients’ information needs, making office calls, providing consultation services, offering themselves as contractors, gathering feedback, and measuring product effectiveness. In the modern age of technology, the entire systems are networked. In the networked environment, few information products can stand alone without a support system. With most of the libraries using technology, the space planning and management would be similar to the data warehousing , data maintenance, data based administration, and data retrieval, data archiving and data purging techniques used in the technological terms. BIBLIOGRAPH : Introduction to Health Sciences Librarianship by M. Sandra Wood.