School Libraries Face Multiple Barriers in Bangladesh
Prodip Roy and
Md Anwarul Islam
Photo: Copyrighted, Bangladesh Shishu Academy
Last year, on National Library Day, the Daily Star published an article entitled “School librarians should be given teacher’ status.” Then on 28th March 2021, a circular was issued by the concerned authority of the Bangladesh government, showing all school librarians and assistant school librarians have been given teacher status. The article was fundamental in the context of that time. After a long movement and waiting period, the school librarians and assistant school librarians got the teacher status. The inequality is now eliminated after the announcement of the new MPO policies and the human resources framework 2021 for private schools and colleges. The new position of the school librarian is called ‘Teacher (Library and Information Science)’, and Assistant Librarian cum Cataloguer is called ‘Assistant Teacher (Library and Information Science).
South Asia Chapter of ASIS&T has been awarded special funding to pursue a unique project on ‘Dealing with COVID-19 and Saving People’s Lives in South Asia (SA) Areas & Beyond – A Health Informatics Promotion Project’. This Chapter proposes to set up a YouTube channel to host multilingual videos for disseminating awareness on a variety of topics on Covid-19 in the South Asia region. This project runs in collaboration with the Asia Pacific and European Chapter to bring their experience dealing with similar viruses in the past. This Chapter expects that the content for these videos will help fight misinformation and disinformation regarding Covid-19 information by citing accurate and reliable sources of information.
