A Review of Current Status and Presenting Proposed Plan for Creating Information Network for all Public Libraries in Iran

Considering the importance of public libraries and providing information services in these libraries, active communication between these libraries and use of information network will promote their qualitative and quantitative levels of information services. The present research also by considering this importance, besides examining information infrastructure of the libraries, tries to propose suggestions for development, reinforcement and creation of active and interactive communication between them. This research consists of three parts. The first part deals with theoretical matters and conceptual foundations of network and networking and outlines some points about network objectives and actions, tasks and role of such networks toward sharing resources, pre-requirements of building network and its topology. Second part of the research reviews the current status of the public libraries. In this section, manpower status, collection development and cataloging, facilities, budgets are surveyed. The results indicated that most libraries do not have specialized manpower, appropriate and sufficient collections, facilities and resources. The third part of this research tries to propose suggestions for improvement of libraries’ condition and providing active and interactive communication between them. For this purpose, a design for creating information network for the examined libraries are proposed with the aim of automating library resources and services including cataloging, digitizing important resources, providing access to the internet, sharing databases such as books, periodicals and other information resources required by the library’s users. Considering the possibilities and limitations of the investigated libraries, the plan has mixed topology. In such a way that some of the network activities such as cataloging, classification, acquisition, document delivery services, current awareness, formulating standards and training are performed centrally by network central core and other services such as abstracting and indexing are performed decentrally with cooperation of the investigated libraries