Measures and Initiatives Adopted by Indian University Libraries During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Introduction:

Health Security of human beings has now become a prime concern in the contemporary modern world after facing various types of security issues like computer security, data security, food security, etc., where mankind is being suffered in multiple ways. The year 2020 has begun with a major health disaster due to novel coronavirus, which leads to national lockdown all over the world. The economy has been shattered and almost all the organizations had to suspend their activities, but with the help of technological support, the majority of the organizations have regained their organizational activities back to normal. Likewise, the universities, research institutions, and their associated libraries and Information centers have played a challenging role in disseminating required information to their clientele and sustained their services amidst much social upheaval. The power of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has turned the situation from crises to opportunities and opened the ways for students and academicians to enlighten their work potential by participating and conducting in online webinars. Both teachers as well as students' fraternity, got benefitted by delivering and learning electronic course content through various means of technologies, respectively. E-learning has become possible with the winsome blend of technology and the World Wide Web. Nowadays, there is ‘n’ number of initiatives taken by the Indian government in the field of ICT to promote e-learning like, SWAYAM (Study Webs of Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds), NPTEL (National Programme for Technology Enhanced Learning), NME (National Mission on Education), e-Gyankosh, Gyan Darshan, etc. Similarly, digital libraries have acted as a boon in such an unprecedented situation. The foremost example is the National Digital Library of India (NDLI), which has created a pool of resources on COVID-19 to share with researchers across India (Jen Cheng, 2020). Many renowned publishers also offered remote access to all the subscribed scholarly content, so that neither any young researcher nor any scientist would be left behind due to the unavailability of scholarly communication. In such a scenario, it will be exciting to know 'what and how' librarians satisfied their users by providing them with pin-pointed and reliable information during the entire national lockdown period.

On the contrary, cons are also there while making use of ICT applications. Nowadays, there are ample sources to get the information on any topic through the means of the Internet which may result in the spread of false/fake information. Consequently, the belief of every individual on the information sources has weakened and thus get shattered. Therefore, the menace of fake or misinformation must be deal with the utmost intelligence and the librarian is the best person who can deal with this menace. According to the world report reported by (Zarocostas, 2020), the Director-General of World Health Organization's (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus signaled that “We're not just fighting an epidemic; we're fighting an infodemic”.

Further, the report highlighted that with each health outbreak, information disorders, or misinformation proliferates throughout the globe. Thus, the role of librarians needs to reassert by finding out the best possible ways in helping the library users and to mitigate every type of learning-based challenge pro-actively. Hence, it is essential to showcase the potential and hard work of librarians by highlighting their efforts which may give births to different innovative services via working remotely. The purpose of this chapter is to assess the efficiency of university libraries by examining the efforts of librarians in the ongoing 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and how a sample of university libraries further respond to this evolving crisis. Thus, the authors had framed the following objectives:

• 1.

  To ascertain the status of library operations during the lockdown at Central libraries of the Central Universities and state universities of India.

• 2.

  To understand the method adopted by libraries to meet the information needs of library usage during the ‘new normal’.

• 3.

  To carry out the new policies in the 'new normal' to sustain library service quality, as opined by the top-most library professionals.

• 4.

  To know the initiatives taken by the librarians in generating the importance of academic libraries in the eyes of the user community.

• 5.

  To carve out the working potential of the library professionals while doing 'Work from Home.'

• 6.

  To understand best practices adopted by the University libraries to meet the CoViD-19 emergency.