Dr. M G Sreekumar
President, MANLIBNET

 

The pace of innovations in the technology domain has revolutionized businesses irrespective of type of products or services offered. The impact of technology developments has been profound across sectors and organizations even in the non-profit and governmental sector as much as in the profit sector. Though many arguments highlight the digital divide there is no doubt that the potential, technology holds for us in the coming times.

In light of this, we can see a host of challenges and opportunities for library professionals across domains that include public libraries, academic libraries and special libraries.

The impact has created a paradigm shift in education, including business and management education. The way we teach, learn, apply and use education has changed dramatically in the last few years posing new challenges and creating new opportunities for Management Faculty.

One of the main challenges in this scenario is the access to “right information at the right time” and this has culminated into a complex phenomenon of information overload leaving Management Faculty gasping for relevant, precise and useful information in their teaching and research endeavors. This brings us to the importance of the life-skill of Information Literacy which not only emphasizes on the need to be aware of an information need but also lets us wade through the information ocean by knowing the existence of various information sources, knowing how to use them, retrieving the relevant information and applying them in our teaching and research work.

In this backdrop, I am happy to announce the section on “Information Skills For Faculty” in the quarterly publication, The Management Faculty. The objective of The Management Faculty is mainly to facilitate faculty development in India – to help faculty become better teachers and researchers. The section “Information Skills For Faculty” has been included with the objective of providing useful articles by library professionals of business and management libraries with a focus on tools, techniques, resources and information trends, for teaching and research faculty in India.

The authors drawn from the domain of library and information science with a focus on business and management librarianship, would share their experiences that would be relevant to the management faculty looking to improve themselves and become better teachers/researchers. The section will also offer ideas, methods and experiences of library professionals that facilitate research and teaching endeavors of the management faculty with effective usage of library resources and services.

It is a privilege to be associated with this innovative project and invite professionals to contribute to the section. The proposed publication is planned to appear four times a year, and will include one article in this section (about one page length) for every issue.