Media Release

Mangaluru, Aug 15: Dr Vishala B K, selection grade librarian, St Agnes College (Autonomous), is the proud recipient of the award ‘Outstanding Community Leader’ for the year 2020, instituted by the ‘The International Institute for Public Policy’, popularly known as IIPP Mangaluru, a wholly owned family organization designed to promote the societal and entrepreneurial spirit in Mangaluru, India with a sole purpose of encouraging the local talents and enthusiasts with a view to create added enthusiasm in the local community.

IIPP is indeed proud to select Dr Vishala as ‘Outstanding Community Leader’ of Mangaluru for the year 2019-2020 because she has given her exceptional knowledge on all affairs pertaining to the library especially over the past 12 months when the library has been expanded to a tenfold fashion to meet the student demand. In a fact changing society where the student education is considered very essential, the existence of a full-fledged Library is considered to be very valuable. St Agnes College strives to provide a wide variety of educational benefit to the community of Mangaluru. Dr Vishala with her extensive knowledge in the library affairs and the St Agnes College want to provide the very best of knowledge to their students with the help of a fully established library.

If, as someone very memorably said, the library is the intellectual nerve-centre of an institution of learning, than the library of St Agnes College must surely be defined as such and its chief librarian termed the pulse of the institution’s acquisition of knowledge. Indeed, through her forethought, planning and ceaseless execution of projects for the library, Dr Vishala has influenced both the manner and the rate at which knowledge is accumulated and disseminated on the institutional campus.

If there is one thing that Dr Vishala could never do, it was to rest on the laurels of her past or sit down and wait for favourable circumstances to come her way. Instead, she got up and made the opportunities for herself, for St Agnes College which she has served with dedication and purpose for 34 years and, above all for the staff and students, through her library ‘reformations’.

Dr Vishala augmented her own educational qualifications with an MPhil and a PhD in Library and Information Science. This serves as proof of her commitment to ongoing personal and professional development. In keeping with the digital age in which she works and functions, she claims web-designing, developing blogs, e-journal management and library automation as her specific areas of expertise. She was quick to see that the future lay with the computerization of the library in St Agnes College and worked with singular energy and devotion to achieve precisely that.

On the purely academic side, Dr Vishala has kept abreast of the latest developments in her field and has enabled others to do so by organizing several seminars and workshops at the national and regional level.

She has, besides, served as resource person at conferences and seminars held at the regional, state and national level. Fifteen research papers written by her have been featured in distinguished national journals. She has put her proficiency and editorial skills to good use by editing books in library science, and national and international conference volumes. At a recently-held International Conference organized by NITK, Surathkal, her paper titled ‘Library Analytics and Metrics According to NAAC Guidelines: Critical Analysis and Observations’ as selected for the Best Paper Award. Dr Vishala also has the distinction of having completed a UGC-sponsored Minor Research Project.

Among the other offices she has held is that of the secretary of the IQAC of St Agnes College, for the period 2012-2017. Besides serving as secretary of the Dakshina Kannada and Kodagu Library Association in Mangaluru, she is enthusiastically involved in the activities of the State Library Association and other professional bodies. She is the current General Secretary of the Association of Mangalore University College Teachers (AMUCT) and Joint Secretary of the Federation of University and College Teachers Associations (FUCTAK), Bengaluru.

Awards have come her way completely unbidden. She was the recipient of the the prestigious ‘Kala National Award’ conferred by the Karnataka State Library Association, Bangalore in 2013 and the ‘State-Level Best Librarian Award’ accorded to her by the Karnataka State SC/ST Library Professionals Association, Bangalore in 2014.

Hers has been the power of passion for and perseverance in the field of her specialization. She has set impressive targets for herself and the St Agnes College Library and worked to ensure that both grew to meet those goals. While it is true that Google can give you a hundred thousand answers or more, Dr Vishala is that librarian who can guide one to the right one.