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Best Practices

 

Introduction

It is often stated that the emergence of Information Society and Knowledge society have given impetus to service sector and quality characteristics are sought in the services offered to the customers

The concept of best practices is not new to the libraries, the Five Laws of Library Science endowed with the philosophy of Best practices and the Catalogue Code for instance may be considered as one of the best practices in LIS.

Online Dictionary of Library and Information Science describes best practices as follows

”In the application of theory to real life situations, procedures that, when properly, applied consistently yield superior results and are therefore used as reference points in evaluation of the effectiveness of alternative methods of accomplishing the same task. Best practices are identified by examining empirical evidence of success”

Set of Best Practices developed by NAAC

Best practices under four broad heads are developed by NAAC
  • Management and Administration of Library
  • Collection and Services
  • Extent of User Services
  • Use of Technology
  • Best practices adapted in Academic Libraries of India
    • Library automation
    • Student/Teacher usage statistics
    • Newspaper clipping services
    • Career Information services
    • Free internet facility
    • Information Literacy Programmes
    • Suggestion box/Feed Back mechanism
    • Displaying new arrivals
    • Conducting Book Exhibition on different occasions
    • Organizing Book talks
    • Annual Best user awards
    • Organizing competitions annually
    • Conducting user survey periodically
    • Updating and maintaining dynamic library website
    • Regular library committee meetings
    • Competitive examination cell/Civil Service reference section
    • Formation of Club
    • Heritage documentary collections
    • Extending library services to rural public
    • Library Reference work and Internal Marks
    • User orientation programmes
    • SMS alert service
    • Digital Library Initiatives
    • Introduction of Barcode, RFID Technologies

    These practices have both traditional and ICT based operations.