Vision and the Changing Roles of the Future Academic Library Professional in the E-Learning Environment : Challenges and Issues

As the information technologies are changing day-today and growing at a tremendous speed, the knowledge society is becoming more complex, competitive and dependent on technological changes and information explosion. The need for e-information services to the users are also growing and becoming very essential. The impact of web based e-learning and teaching environment has influenced every facet of library and information services in academic libraries and providing new opportunities and challenges to the library professional for involvement in the knowledge based society including electronic and multimedia publishing, Internet based-information services, global networking, web based digital resources etc. Librarians are charged with selecting and organizing resources and instructing patrons on how to locate and use these, and preserving information regardless of format or technology. The information revolution and the knowledge that is available on the Web have created new challenges to these traditional professional ethics. The emerging challenges of acquiring and providing access to electronic knowledge resources require librarians to change their role from traditional librarian to information scientist by learning and applying new skills to understand the evolving technologies to manage and provide quality on-line information service to the knowledge society. So the vision of the future academic library professional must be to create a World Class Networked Global Library and Information Centre to provide timely web based quality information service to the user in time in the e-learning environment. The future visions need for changes in academic libraries, trends and challenges before the library professional in the elearning environment and the various changing roles of the academic library professional also have been discussed in this study.