Kritika Sharma
Journalism & The Role Of Library
Imagine “ the beautiful smell of books, the rough texture of the crinkly yellow pages touching your fingers, the quietest room in the college, a temple of knowledge that acts as a saviour before your exams and an amalgamation of ideas that widens your horizon and creativity” Did you imagine a library too? Well if you think there are a lot of similarities between a journalist and a librarian they both facilitate access to information, strive for objectivity and work to support well informed communities in a non biassed way. The Library acts as a reservoir of human thoughts and expressions and serves the society by making them easily accessible to the public. It is a treasure trove of information for voracious readers, researchers and anyone who is eager to learn. For media and journalism students E- libraries and databases such as National Digital Library & DELNET act as back bones of consuming credible content with ease and convenience of accessing the information from anywhere in the world at their own pace with cost effective and eco friendly measures. With the growth of internet people use social media as a gateway for news bypassing the limited supply of physical magazines and newspapers provided by the library but now due to the love hate relationship with the internet and being unable to discriminate the real content in the ocean of fake information on the internet people are slowly creeping back to the original methods. With the increasing number of paywalls popping on newspaper and magazine sites people are finding it difficult to access quality journalism without paying a hefty price for it. Coming to the rescue are thousands of public, academic, and specialty libraries around the world that are sponsoring access to trusted media on behalf of their patrons. Public libraries now are the saviours in a trust deficient world. Journalism helps to create a conversation that connects communities. If the quality of journalism is made available in libraries it will fuel the power of the person and the collective by connecting people and ideas. In collaboration media and libraries can not only promote media literacy and tackle misinformation but also spur civic engagement and fill the gaps left in coverage by news organisations.
Written by : Kritika Sharma
Roll No. 24/087
No responses yet