The National Human Rights Commission deputed Shri Jaimini Kumar Srivastava, Information & Public Relations Officer along with Shri Om Prakash, Librarian to attend a 'Regional Conference on Human Rights Library Management' at Bangkok, Thailand from the 20th - 22nd May, 2015. The conference was opened only to the participants of previous workshops and trainings, held by the RWI, on the Libraries and Information Management. The aim of the Conference was to discuss the outcome of those workshops and trainings before the conclusion of the programme.
Apart from the three resource persons, total 39 participants from the NHRIs of Jordan, Palestine, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Nepal, South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives and East Timor attended the Conference.
The NHRC, India was lauded for its collection of over 25 thousand books on human rights issues and related laws among other subjects and the future plan for digitization of books and documents as shared by Shri Om Prakash. Shri Jaimini Kumar Srivastava was asked to summerise the outcome of the group discussions on 'What has been done so far and where do we go from here?'
It was felt that the workshops did help streamline the functioning of the Libraries in the NHRIs. However, a serious thought was required to be given, at an appropriate senior level, to fix the relevance of a Library in the functioning of an NHRI in exercise of its mandate. More was needed to be done in order to evolve them as 'Resource Centers' for exclusive information on human rights and related literature rather than turning them into traditional Libraries. These should house not only the printed material in the form of books, journals, magazines but also archival documents related to human rights, including human rights and NHRI related news clippings, audio - video recordings and photographs of its events.
The lack of trained human resources in the NHRI Libraries was the most common concern. Dedicated page of the Library having a link on the Home Page of the website of the NHRI and a small Reading Room and Audio-Visual Show Room were some of the facilities which were most commonly advocated for Libraries. It was also felt that a policy of weeding out some stored material in the Library of an NHRI should also be worked out to address the issue of shortage of space.
Later, the participants were also taken to the NHRI of Thailand to see the facilities in its Library and some modern gadgets being used there.