Ak­ile Si­mon

The Na­tion­al Li­brary and In­for­ma­tion Sys­tems Au­thor­i­ty (Nalis) has dished out a ser­vice to the pub­lic at a val­ue of more than $144 mil­lion for the last fis­cal year.

But a sur­vey con­duct­ed re­vealed there was a de­cline in the us­age at pub­lic li­braries. This dis­clo­sure was made by Nalis' ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor An­nette Wal­lace on Tues­day, while speak­ing at the open­ing cer­e­mo­ny of the Ari­ma Pub­lic Li­brary on Pro Queen Street in Ari­ma.

"We re­cent­ly placed a dol­lar val­ue on our ser­vices for fis­cal year 2007 to 2008...We val­ued our In­ter­net use, cir­cu­la­tion and loans ser­vices (on­ly) and the cal­cu­lat­ed val­ue of the ser­vice we pro­vid­ed was $144,614,246," Wal­lace said. She said dur­ing the pe­ri­od No­vem­ber 2008 to Jan­u­ary 2009, Mar­ket Facts and Opin­ion (MFO) con­duct­ed a sur­vey of main­ly non-users of the li­brary ser­vice.

"A very in­ter­est­ing point which the sur­vey re­vealed (among many in­ter­est­ing points) was the per­cep­tion of li­braries by non-users, many seem to view li­braries like they left them at their last vis­it some years ago–places with old dusty books, un­touched by tech­nol­o­gy," Wal­lace said. "Li­brary lit­er­a­ture re­minds us that when times are tough, li­brary us­age in­creas­es.

"So if I am to view my coun­try with a li­brar­i­an's eye, Trinidad and To­ba­go is not in a re­ces­sion as yet be­cause li­brary us­age has not in­creased."

She said Cab­i­net re­cent­ly ap­proved the Pub­lic Li­brary De­vel­op­ment Plan which en­vis­aged the con­struc­tion of li­braries in a phased ap­proach from 2008 to 2020.

?In­for­ma­tion Min­is­ter Neil Parsan­lal said the Gov­ern­ment recog­nised that in or­der to meet the needs of first world na­tion as­pi­ra­tions, hu­man cap­i­tal must be de­vel­oped. "This com­mit­ment to in­crease pub­lic ac­cess to in­for­ma­tion is ev­i­dent," he said.

"The new li­brary will con­tin­ue to sup­port its stake­hold­ers, com­mu­ni­ties and their ed­u­ca­tion­al in­sti­tu­tions by pro­vid­ing out­reach ser­vices, pro­grammes and re­sources, both hard copy and elec­tron­ic copy, aimed at im­prov­ing lit­er­a­cy and the abil­i­ty to ac­cess var­i­ous forms of in­for­ma­tion in to­day's in­creas­ing­ly tech­no­log­i­cal and knowl­edge-based world."