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Question: How can the library and information services adapt and develop in order to for the library to stay relevant in this digital era and some essential components of lifelong learning and the knowledge dissemination for all? What is your opinion also on having the physical library or the traditional library in this digital era?

Answer: The need for knowledge and information is a basic need for human being. This is evident because in every decisions that you make you need to know something even the smallest decisions like what clothes to wear today you need to know what is the program for today.

Our dependent on information and knowledge is basic necessity in our daily life. It is just like our dependence on food. No matter how you hate food, you have to eat or you'll die. This concept also apply to information and knowledge. So whatever you want to do, you need to think and decide. Every decision you will need input from information that you have from the knowledge that you understand that you know.

The problem is just like food, if you don't have good food you will end up eating junk food. So similarly with the information and knowledge, if you don't have the right and authoritative information you will still use information maybe fake or spam information to make decisions and you will end up with bad decisions.

So the importance of the library and information services is very clear, just the challenge is for us to compete with the bad, fake and spam information that which now is an epidemic in the social media such as WhatsApp. There are lots of misleading information being shared so laymen sometimes don't realize that this is good or bad information, just like many laymen do not be able to differentiate between good or bad food. The challenge is we have to highlight the authoritative and through facts to view.

The importance of information stays but the challenge to the libraries is to help people become information literate so that they know which correct or fake information. So that is why the quotations by the Chairman of Pustaka Negeri Sarawak, "We need too work bottom up. We need to train the parents to become librarians". This mean to say the parents will help us to raise their children with the awareness on an information literacy with the ability and skill to evaluate the source of the information and to identify what kind of information are needed in a particular life problem that they are facing or in any decisions that they need to make no matter how small.

As for the physical libraries, now they are still in a transition era from the traditional libraries to the modern libraries with digital collections such as e-books. The existence of traditional library and printed books is still very much needed because if you don't really see things you will tend to forget about reading, lifelong learning the love for books culture. The conclusion is now we still need the physical libraries, maybe in the future we can transition into fully digital but in the meantime both are needed and that is why the need to create every home one library (e-library and physical library) where collections of books can be created in order to influence the children into loving books and practicing reading culture.

In addition to practice crowdsourcing, the families will rely on the physical public libraries and the capability is limited. For example, Sarawak has more than 5000 villages and government couldn't afford to build public libraries for each villages. So, if parents are more information literate and wanted to invest in creating public libraries and book sharing among the neighborhoods through little free library which is the popular global movement now the community will benefit from it.

In addition to this, Pustaka soon will launch My Tiny Library Program with the ideas people can share books among the community such as children books that which is no longer used when the child has grown up and hope this can contribute to early childhood development.

(Source: TUAN HAJI JAPRI BUJANG MASLI, PUSTAKA NEGERI SARAWAK (PRESENTER FOR SAL.co2023), 18 Sep 2023)

Source Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-6kYvkUnQg