Effective Use of Library

On 29th August, 2022, the Library Committee of The Bhawanipur Education Society College (in collaboration with IQAC) organized a one-day workshop on “Effective Use of Library” at the Society Hall. This workshop was aimed at acquainting the library staff, faculty members and students with contemporary digital tools and implements which would facilitate improved utilisation of library resources. The speakers invited to the event were Dr. N. C. Ghosh, Librarian at IIM, Calcutta and Dr. Pritam Gurey, Librarian at the Asiatic Society. The event was attended by the library staff, members of the Library Committee and students from UG and PG departments of the Arts Section.

Figure 1: From Left: Dr. N. C. Ghosh, Dr. Pritam Gurey, Dr. Subhabrata Ganguly and Prof. Tathagata Sen

The workshop began at 11.30 am with a welcome address by Dr. Subhabrata Ganguly, Teacher-in-Charge of the Bhawanipur Education Society College. In his speech, Dr. Ganguly traced a history of libraries across world-cultures and commented on the digitization of libraries in modern times. Afterwards, the two speakers were felicitated by the Library Committee members. Subsequently, Prof. Tathagata Sen, IQAC Coordinator delivered a brief speech on the pristine pleasures conjoined with manual handling of resources at traditional libraries.

Figure 2: Dr. Pritam Gurey being felicitated by UG Semester V student

Dr. N. C. Ghosh’s presentation was titled “Understanding Metrics for measuring the Impact of Scholarly Communications”. He began with a brief contemplation on the evolution of changes in the medium for recording scholarly communications. Subsequently, he introduced the audience to several nuances of scholarly communications, namely its definitions, channels and cycles. An integral portion of his lecture was devoted to various modes of estimating the impact of scholarly publications in online academic communities; some fundamental varieties of impact include article impact, journal impact, author impact, book impact and book chapter impact. Dr. Ghosh spoke of various softwares capable of generating journal citation reports which provide scholars with transparent, publisher-neutral data and statistics. The presentation focused on some appropriate modes of estimating the impact of a particular journal, some of which would include the SCImago Journal Rank, Impact per Publication (IPP) and the Immediacy Index. The lecture concluded with a reflection on possible strategies to maximize the impact of scholarly output in online scholarly communities. Dr. Ghosh’s presentation was followed by a brief Question-Answer round, which was succeeded by a fifteen-minute tea-break.

Figure 3: Dr. N. C. Ghosh during his presentation

At 12.45 pm, the second session of the workshop resumed with the presentation of Dr. Pritam Gurey which was titled “Similarity Detection: An Important Approach towards Quality Publication”. The presentation began with a reflection with a definition of plagiarism and its considerably wide range of manifestation, not only in scholarly publications, but also in film posters and music. Direct plagiarism, patchwork plagiarism, paraphrasing plagiarism and unintentional plagiarism are some of its variants. Dr. Gurey spoke at length on the different formats of citation which is an indispensable practice for tackling plagiarism. Subsequently, he demonstrated with the aid of pre-recorded screenshots how various plagiarism-detection tools such as Turnitin and Ouriginal operate—this provided a revealing insight into the handling of plagiarism-detection tools to the members of the audience. The presentation was followed by a Question-Answer round where members of the library staff, Committee members and students directed their queries to the speaker.

Figure 4: Dr. Pritam Gurey during his presentation

The Vote of Thanks was delivered by Prof. Piu Chatterjee. The entire workshop was ably conducted by Prof. Dona Ganguly. The “Effective Use of Library” workshop has served to enrich the academicians and students of the Bhawanipur College by making them better-acquainted with modern technological advancements in the field of digital archiving and handling of digitized academic resources.

Figure 5: Prof. Piu Chatterjee delivering the Vote of Thanks

Figure 6: Dr. Pritam Gurey, Members of the Library Committee and Students at the end of the workshop