By Arthur Vespry
Director, Library and Regional Documentation Centre
Asian Institute of Technology

I grew up in Trinidad where as a student I worked in the Public Library. I took my first professional training from the Library Association (Britain) and came to Canada for my BA (Ottawa) and my BLS (McGill).

My interest in the wider world of library services led me to postings with the IAEA in Vienna and subsequently with IDRC, first as a librarian setting up the IDRC Library in Ottawa and later as a project officer in Singapore. There I met many Asian librarians and found that, despite the differences in culture, they were, in their own way, as concerned about their services as we were in Canada.

Unfortunately they did not have available to them the facilities readily available in Canada. Thus, when my contract with IDRC ended, and after 3 l/2 years with the IAEA in Vienna, I was happy to return to Asia, first as a UNESCO consultant in Manila and then as Associate Director and later Director of the Library and Regional Documentation Centre (LRDC) at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) in Bangkok's northern suburbs.

The AIT is in several ways a unique establishment. It was the successor to the SEATO graduate school of engineering (founded in 1959) when the former came to an end in 1967. AIT is not a Thai government university. It has no undergraduate courses and its curriculum is heavily weighted towards civil engineering, with the recent addition of telecommunications and technology management degrees. The closest link with the social sciences is its Human Settlements Development Division.

The institution is funded mainly by scholarship money and grants from bilateral donor governments.

About half of the faculty members are from the region. The rest are expatriates seconded and paid by their governments to work at AIT. Almost all faculty members have doctorates.

The LRDC, which has recently changed its name to the Centre for Library and Information Resources (CLAIR), was really two quite distinct institutions, with completely different mandates. The Library (the "L in LRDC) is totally financed by AIT and serves its faculty, students and staff. In contrast, RDC was a grouping of four information centres created at different times with donor funding and a mandate to attain sustainability through sale of publications, fees for information services and external projects. They serve a specialist clientele throughout the Asian region as well as AIT faculty and students in the associated divisions.

The four centres, which have independent budgets and databases, are:

• AGE - Asian Geotechnical Engineering Information Center
• ENSIC - Environmental Systems Information Center
• IFIC - International Ferrocement Information Center
• RERIC - Regional Energy Resources Information Center.

Because of this split in the LRDC, two distinct types of librarianship could be found. The librarians, all Thai, worked in the Library. They adhered to traditional 1950s and 1960s library patterns while the "information scientists" in the RDC and its variety of nationalities were deeply concerned with all aspects of service, from creation to dissemination and marketing of information products.

Since the RDC needed to make money to sustain itself and since my interests were primarily with special libraries, I devoted most of my time to supporting and developing the RDC. As director of the RDC, I was responsible, among others, for initiating and coordinating fund-raising efforts and projects that paid the salaries of the 25 staff members.

One of the RDC's most successful projects was an annual twelve week training course for information managers called New Information Technologies and Computerized Library Services (NITCLIS). After two years the course had become well-known to attract students from most Asian countries (Cambodia, China, Bangladesh, Brunei, India, Indonesia, Laos, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam,) as well as a few African countries.

The course was aimed at changing attitudes and developing an ability to use computers, including CDS/ISIS software, to bring about a change from book-orientation to a focus on information management and service provision, including concepts of sustainability and marketing.

The students ranged from senior librarians from national libraries, library school teachers, librarians and information officers in special libraries to computer programmers.

Initially, not many Thais participated. However, as time passed, more and more Thai librarians joined the course (given in English). In 1993 one or two courses of shorter duration were offered only in Thai.

At one point, revenues from this programme covered about 25% of the RDC budget.

Because English is the language of instruction at AIT, my contact with Thai libraries was limited. There is a Thai Library Association but its programmes are naturally in Thai, a language in which I have regrettably still little facility. Many senior Thai librarians are Western-trained. They try to pass on their training and experience through the library schools to the new professionals.

Thai librarians are trained in two separate groups: those in teacher's colleges training to be teacher-librarians and those training at the university level to be special, academic and in a few cases public librarians.

A large percentage of the librarians are recruited by the government since most government offices assume that they must have a librarian. Unfortunately the role of the librarian has been seen as custodial and librarians have been seen as not much superior to office clerks. Thailand has almost no public libraries so that is not a viable career aspiration.

The status of librarians has gradually been changing in recent years. Young librarians trained abroad are more service-oriented and they are slowly taking the most prestigious jobs from their older more book-oriented colleagues.

At the same time, the computer as a library tool has changed the role of librarians. More of them are turning to customer service. This is seen mainly in university libraries which are usually well-funded, even though they are almost all government and are part of the civil service.

There has been in the past five to 10 years a rapid growth in private universities and even international schools. These have launched themselves into the computer age. Freed from the concern and time absorbing labour of cataloguing, the librarians in these institutions have become more pro-active.

Since, in the universities and special libraries, the English language collection forms more than 50% of the titles LC cataloguing has been the norm. It was natural for librarians to accept Bibliofile and other similar products on CD-ROM.

As yet there is no union catalogue of books in Thailand. AIT was responsible for the production of the first union list of serials. The AIT computer was also used for printing the second edition but the third edition was produced entirely by Thai institutions.

The concept of Inter-library loan has grown slowly, but it is still a long way from the North American system. Many Thai librarians prefer to use the British Lending Library or JICST rather than to try to borrow from sister institutions in the country.

Copyright © 1996 SLA. All rights reserved.

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