Got an opportunity to be an accidental guest to a conference on libraries.
I-KOAL 2023, International Conference on Knowledge Organization in Academic Libraries was jointly organised by CDAC and Library Professionals Association.
Being an accidental guest, I had to quickly gather my thoughts on how I relate to libraries and what impact ICT will have and is having on libraries. Here are some wild thoughts of mine which I discussed and I remember now. Obviously, a guest need not talk academic and has freedom to share a commoner's perspective. Here is mine.
I relate to libraries through books. Love for reading is a gift that my father has shared with me. And maybe that's why he got me married to daughter of a librarian!
I consider libraries as warehouses of knowledge as in warehouses of e-commerce companies. They are near you, your city, your University or your school or maybe even your home, if you are lucky. They deliver you knowledge thru the books by making them available near you in an organised fashion.
The revolution of information has shaped this new world. Libraries being the very part of this evolution have changed dramatically for the last couple of decades. The conference had multiple papers on this topic. The new age tech habits have changed the libraries and have even challenged the very existence of the typical traditional libraries.
Humanity started sharing knowledge thru speech, by reciting it again and again. Then came the scripts, the writing, the books and the libraries. This evolution has enriched humanity and has accelerated the development of human civilization. Digitization and automation of libraries and knowledge is a natural step in this evolution.
I consider Google as the largest and most efficient librarian. It keeps track of a huge pile of knowledge, organises it and retrieves the most relevant one in the least possible time. I am confident that the hard copy books aren't getting eliminated any time soon. But there is a significant reduction in preference to printed books over the digital content.
A concern that one of the speakers mentioned was about the authenticity of knowledge in the digital forms. I think that concern holds true for the huge amount of printed content also. The quality of content is not decided by what form it is in. It's in the writing. And so we might have rubbish being printed and sold as print books also.
The developments in the area of Artificial Intelligence are impacting many areas of life. Libraries are not any exceptions. For that matter, libraries are one of the nearest neighbours of AI as they both deal with information and retrieval of information. Advents in Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval have already changed information business a lot. Reduced frequency of visits to Libraries is an indication of the same. The recent developments in AI and NLP are going miles ahead in this direction and their impact needs to be assessed on libraries. As much as possible, these newer mediums should be brought under the collaboration umbrella by the libraries!
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