(Pakistan News & Features Services)
The Pakistan Library Association (PLA), for better part of its 65-year life, has remained in the news for the wrong reasons. Having come into being in 1956, it has often been declared wanting to deliver the goods as the representative national body of librarians in the country.
“The PLA as usual again is in slumber and there is no sign of any activity. The candidates who contest in the elections of the PLA promise to activate it but after election dwell stagnation. We request them to wake up and fulfill their responsibilities,” Prof Dr Ghani-ul-Akram Sabzwari, one of the founding fathers of library science in Pakistan, highlighted the matter in the editorial of the latest issue of the Pakistan Library and Information Science Journal (PLISJ).
While the Library Promotion Bureau (LPB), which he had founded in 1966, has continued to function within its modest resources all along, the same could not be said about the PLA which has faced criticism on a constant basis from the library scientists.
Prof Dr Sabzwari, in his hard-hitting editorial of the PLISJ (July-September 2021) issue, has regretted that the PLA did not publish proceedings of many of the national conferences which they organized from time to time.
“Conference literature of any discipline is important to researchers. It normally acts, after further refinement, as a stepping stone for the journal literature. I wish that the PLA tries to collect at least the published documents belonging to it and makes their digitalized copies available on demand. This will help the researchers find historical documents easily and conduct research,” Prof Dr Mumtaz Ali Anwar has remarked in his article published in the same issue of the journal.
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