Health Challenges of the Library Professionals from Rajasthan, India

Abstract

The library and information science professionals (LISP) work restless to serve their clienteles till the satisfaction level of the procurement of the information desired by the users. The services of LSIP are beyond the acquisition of the information material. These are the continuous efforts for the preservation of the resources from the dust, molds, insects (silverfish, termites etc.), climatic factors (high temperature, humidity) and other types of physical damages like brittleness of the papers, tearing of books, breaking down of hard materials (like CDs) etc. The LISP performs various types of activities which include spray of chemicals (like pesticides, preservatives) and digitization of old books. All these activities result into the health challenges among the human resources in form of the librarians and other library staff. The health issues are mostly related to the allergy and the respiratory problems along with other common physical concerns like headache, blood pressure, back pain, obesity, facial skin damage etc. which leads to the serious ailments viz. cancer, cardiac arrest. The present investigation is an attempt to review of the health challenges drawn from the observations on the randomly selected hundred LISPs from the state of Rajasthan (India). A short survey through the semi-structured interviews was undertaken to observe the general physical aspects (BMI) of the respondents along with the associated ailments (based on response without any medical reports). The result indicated the lower proportion of the normal BMI among the respondents. Besides, every LISP was suffering from one or more kind of the ailment. Backache was the most common among the LISPs. The inference drawn from the review investigation indicated that the policy for the LISPs with primary focus on the health is the need of the time for the academic libraries of the developing nations.