English Article- Is Librarianship a Teaching Profession in Bangladesh?

 

Is Librarianship a Teaching Profession in Bangladesh?

Aktarul Islam

Is librarianship a teaching profession or can a librarian be called a teacher? This must be an awkward question to many as the idea of a library or the profession of a librarian often creates confusion not only among the common masses but a larger portion of the educated community has the narrowest view regarding library and librarianship at large in Bangladesh. Even to many people “Book store” is a library and the person who sells books to the customers is a librarian by profession. On the academic premises also, the librarians are not valued properly by the academics because they do hardly consider “Librarianship” as a teaching profession, rather a clerical job without having a proper understanding of the roles and responsibilities of the librarians. The library professionals are also to be held responsible for this inconvenient library phenomenon. Their inertia to learn, inability to transpire professionalism, unwillingness to accustom to the changing world of information, and tendency to show a cold shoulder to the profession are the rudimentary pernicious trammels that are narrowing down the standard of library profession and acceptance of the library professional equivalent to the status of the academicians in Bangladesh.

In Australian schools and colleges, a qualified librarian is termed a “Teacher Librarian” who engages himself/ herself in curriculum knowledge and pedagogy in combination with library and information management skills. The roles of the librarian-teachers are to support and implement the vision of their academic communities through suggesting and building effective library and information services and programs that extensively contribute to the growth and development of learning and teaching activities. Mary K Bolin, a professor of University Libraries at the University of Nebraska, has researched the status of Librarians in US research universities where she revealed that 80% of librarians among the grant universities are considered “Faculty members” and like many other universities in the USA, the University of Miami has a professorial rank for the university librarians. Librarianship in India has been accoladed and recognized as one of the most prestigious jobs and unlike in Bangladesh, it is considered a teaching profession in almost every educational institution. Librarians are the teachers of different subjects like Theory of Knowledge, Linguistics, Indian Studies, and the like in India. In addition, the librarian is a teacher who works with Principals and senior teachers in a school or college to ensure information literacy, formulate curriculum planning, and raise awareness among the teaching staff regarding the needs of the students to acquire knowledge, information skills, and develops policies, procedures for selecting resources to meet curriculum, informational and other recreational needs of the students.  

Like any other country in Europe, Librarianship is treated as a prestigious and lucrative job everywhere in the UK.  In almost all educational institutions, librarians are to provide learning and cultural experiences through teaching, group discussion, formal and informal lectures on information literacy, and research-oriented topics for the students and other faculty members concerning pedagogical knowledge. In Canada, academic librarians enjoy the status of academicians as teaching and research are the core functionalities of most Canadian academic libraries and librarians are to engage themselves from soup to nuts in teaching, collaborating with faculty in research, promoting scholarship, and striving relentlessly to enhance the student experience regarding curriculum and information literacy skills. In the academic library, librarians are intensely involved in accomplishing the mission of higher education, exchanging information among the academicians, offering remote access to library services for the user community, and handling interlibrary lending procedures to invigorate the roles of the libraries as a major hub for teaching and learning.

The inception of library culture in Bangladesh started in 1850 during the British Colonial era with the establishment of 4 public libraries. Local landlords and influential educated communities used to patronize these libraries to steer up literacy campaigns among the common masses. Though academic libraries in Bangladesh including libraries of universities, schools, and colleges were set up more than a hundred years ago to expand teaching and learning initiatives, the growth and development of librarianship are still below the satisfactory level compared to other developed and developing nations. The culture of “teaching library” and “librarian teacher”, developed in the 1960s in Europe and later on in Asia, is still obscure terminologies for most academicians and researchers in Bangladesh. Even the librarians engaged in schools, colleges, and universities are more or less unconscious and in many cases totally in the dark about their roles as “teachers”. However, after many hurdles and struggles, school and college librarians got their “teaching status” back on 28 March 2021 since the creation of the librarian post under the National Education Policy 2010.

The fight for gaining the status of an academician at the university level along with affiliated government colleges under the National University is still a relevant and crucial issue for the Bangladeshi library professionals to resolve within the logical framework of librarianship and pedagogy. Librarians engaged in the university libraries play dominant roles in involving students intensively in critical thinking, problem-solving, information seeking, and lifelong learning. Unlike schools and colleges, university library management and curriculum activities face numerous challenges, including installing teaching and research initiatives to keep pace with the demand of the 21st century. Technological implications and the diversified nature of knowledge put the teaching profession evolving around the constant trek of growth and development of civilization. This is a challenging and daunting issue that requires relentless effort and devotion.  Librarians have to usher in a new era in the realm of knowledge along with the revolutionary changes in information and technology to take part in teaching and learning programs at the university levels.