Malaysian Libraries and Librarians: a state-of-the-art

Well the title above is meant to be a joke and not meant for anybody. When I was in college the phrase state-of-the-art had always been in whatever papers or articles that we read in fact even our own papers most of the times were titled with ‘state-of-the-art’ as on component. If my friends reading this I am very sure they would be smiling. Joking aside what I am going to share would probably have some truth to it when you look closely to the state of our profession in Malaysia. My observations are derived from two things that I was part of not too long ago.

The first event was the gathering of local librarians under the ‘skim gunasama’ Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia and the second was the launching of the Perpunet Portal at MMU. The main issue in the first event was still basic which was more or less how to provide more innovative services in the wake of the challenges that are facing us. Why I say basic because the issues raised as well as the questions asked were basic questions how to be get buy-in from the management, how to provide better services, how to utilize the technology that they have, how to be proactive and to look beyond the obvious. It is still very much a mentality issue to me. In between complacent and not confident lies certain degree of incompetence as well.

In the second event I witnessed that we are ready to move ahead and willing to take the risk more. The majority it seems understands what we need to do and I just hope we can stay focus a bit more. However, my colleague sitting next to me mentioned to me on his experience during one KM local conference recently. He said the kind of questions asked during the conference were so basic similar to questions that I explained when I started out on this KM journey 10 years ago. It is sad but that’s the reality and after all the conferences it is still remain the same. Something is wrong somewhere and I hope somebody in relevant places would do something about it. As for me, frankly, I am already tired talking and speaking about it. Thinking aloud however I could not ignore it and although I am more on a doing mode now I still need to do some talking still.