Library Professionals Category in College

[Nandkishore Patidar]

The personnel in the library can broadly be divided into 

1. Professionals

The persons of this category generally have high academic qualification. They perform duties relating to education and research and bear the responsibility of taking policy decisions and they are of the top ranking administrators. Since they involve in the development of innovative methods, new procedures, policies in library matters and are on decision-making committees. They do require rich practical experience, good knowledge in the professional matters and competence in performance, professionals-professors, readers of library schools, university librarians and deputy librarians come under this category-professional seniors, and lecturers in library schools and assistant librarians in the university library, college librarians come under professional juniors.

2 Semi-Professionals

The persons in this category mostly perform routine and repetitive jobs in a library. They may also be called as junior professionals. They usually have a qualification, a degree or a diploma in library science, and they perform all jobs- circulation, cataloguing, classification, accessioning, periodical registration -which require technical qualification, experience but not required to take any decision. 67

3 Unskilled Workers

The persons under this category take up jobs which do not require any type of technical knowledge. Clerical, secretarial staff and class IV employees will come under this category. There is no clear-cut gradation of these cadres. Different institutions following different categories and professional organization in different countries have set up these categories in different ways. Also there is no uniformity in the adoption of these cadres in different organizations. However, library needs all these categories of persons –professionals, semi-professionals and unskilled manpower to perform different jobs. It is essential to recruit such personnel as per the recruitment of the individual libraries