IWHIL 2011

Dr. Jagtar Singh

Dr. Jagtar Singh is working as the Professor and Head, Department of Library and Information Science, Faculty of Education and Information Science, Punjabi University, Patiala (India). He has 25 years of teaching and research experience and about 100 papers and a book entitled, ‘Information Democracy and South Asia: Promises and Perils of the Web’ to his credit. He has contributed chapters in prestigious publications, such as Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science (Marcel Dekker), Librarianship and Information Work Worldwide (Bowker Saur), International Dictionary of Library Histories (Fitzroy Dearborn), IFLA Publication, 102: Libraries in the Information Society (Bowker Saur), and Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science (Taylor & Francis). He had also jointly edited a book entitled, ‘Library and Information Science in Digital Age’. This is the first volume in the LIS profession in which about 40 international experts have contributed papers on the leading edge of library and information science.

Besides being on the editorial boards of about a dozen of international peer-reviewed journals, he has also served as Chief Editor for the ILA Bulletin, the official organ of the Indian Library Association (ILA). He is the recipient of the Commonwealth Academic Staff Fellowship (1992), IFLA Netherlands Conference Grant for the 64th Amsterdam IFLA (1998), OCLC Dublin Core Grant (1999), Salzburg Seminar Fellowship (2003) and the Ken Haycock Leadership Development Award (2005) (IASL). He has also been awarded Certificate of Appreciation by UNESCO for outstanding contributions to the Training-The-Trainers in Information Literacy Workshop 2008-2009. He has been the Standing Committee Member of the IFLA Information Technology Section, and is at present a Standing Committee Member of the Classification and Indexing Section of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), the Netherlands. He has also served as Former Director-Asia, International Association of School Librarianship (IASL), Australia. He is an International Affiliate of the International Institute for the Study of Digital Inclusion (ISDI), Stetson University (USA), and Consultant Professor for the Ph. D Programme at the National Institute of Library and Information Sciences (NILIS), University of Colombo, Colombo. He is also lifetime member of the SATKAL Presidium, President of the Punjab Library Association (PLA), and Government of India nominee on the Governing Board of Raja Rammohun Roy Library Foundation, Kolkata.

He has visited Austria, Bangladesh, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Malaysia, Netherlands, Pakistan, Singapore, Thailand, Sri Lanka, UK, and USA on various academic assignments. He has also served as ‘Project Leader’ for the IFLA-UNESCO Workshop on Information Literacy (2005), and the UNESCO sponsored workshop on ‘Training-the-Trainers (TTT) in Information Literacy ’held at Patiala from 05-07 November 2008. Recently he has very successfully hosted the IFLA/FAIFE Sponsored Workshop on ‘Role of Libraries as Transparency Institutions to Check Corruption at Public Places’ from 17-18 November 2009. This workshop has been held in South Asia for the first time and was led by Dr. Kai Ekholm, Director, National Library of Finland, and Dr. Barbara Jones, IFLA/FAIFE Expert from USA.

He is the President of the Indian Association of Teachers of Library and Information Science (IATLIS), and also the Country Representative of the UNESCO Project InfoLit Global. He is a much sought after library consultant and has facilitated the development of many departments of library and information science in India and South Asia. Areas of interest include LIS education and research, knowledge management, knowledge organization, open source initiatives, digital libraries, information literacy and institutional repositories. He has been appointed Project Coordinator to host the ‘IFLA-UNESCO First World Conference on Information Literacy for Lifelong Learning (FWC)’ during the year 2011-12. In this conference, which is taking place for the first time in the world, about 1000 delegates are expected to participate from more than 100 countries of the world. Being President of the IATLIS, he is going to lead a chain of workshops on information literacy and library advocacy in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives and Mauritius. He is also associated with various collaborative projects with IFLA, UNESCO, and other international bodies.