Muhammed Zubair is a devoted, unconventional and above all a hospitable chief librarian of Bedil Library, Sharfabad, Karachi, whom I meet daily and find an opportunity to pay heed to his personal experiences as a chief librarian of a specialised library of literature comprising more than 100,000 books and files of hundreds of literary magazines dating back to the 19th century.
He once says that there are many reasons involved not to flourish a culture among people to visit libraries in Pakistan since it came into being. Many scholars and poets were determined to establish a library and they made tremendous efforts to cater books as much as they could from every nook and cranny of Pakistan and abroad. Zafeerul Hasan was an example of his own who established a library widely known as Bedil Library which is now beginning to expand by leaps and bound.
There were many libraries established in Pakistan and closed due to insufficient financial resources let alone employing skilled staff to a library. A library along with librarian must employ an indexer, cataloguer and classifier. A few libraries in Pakistan are equipped with these skilled staffers. Now in Pakistan, a librarian has to do many works for which he is not employed such as he has to index, catalogue and classify. In a nutshell, he is overworked. This has resulted in making a library an uninteresting place to visit as he is not aware of the new and scientific trends of making a library a place to visit considering the demands of the readers in a changing world.
In this regard, titles—that are published in the developed countries—contain its classification and catalogue number making the work of a librarian a bit easier to index a book to place its right place. Otherwise, a librarian has to spend his ample time in reading a title to know its genre and subject in order to catalogue, classify and index it. Sang-e-Meel Publications, Lahore, is the only publisher in Pakistan whose titles contain this information, easing the work of a librarian.
There are many known publishers of Pakistan whose published works are errorless and commendable and they can print such information on their titles as sometime a librarian is unable to ascertain which catalogue number to assign due to un-indicative of its subject. If the publishers in Pakistan prefer to add such information, this will meet the internationally recognised standard of publication.
JAWED AHMED KHURSHEED
Karachi
