Quezon City Mayor Herbert Bautista is aiming to build more libraries and encourage reading in the barangays or communities of the city.
Bautista said although Quezon City has a world-class public library in city hall, there is still a need to develop more libraries in the barangays.
“It’s more challenging now that we have a laudable public library at city hall. We still need to improve our community libraries, and better if we can add to them,” he said.
The mayor acknowledged that the lack of vacant spaces and number of licensed librarians in the barangays pose problems.
“Managing a library is a science, it’s why the college course for this is Library Science, and you even have to pass the board exams. I just don’t know if we’ll have librarians available,” he said.
Meanwhile, the city government will mark the first anniversary of the Quezon City Public Library with the launching of its radio-frequency identification or RFID tagging system, the first and only public library in the Philippines to use this new technology.
The RFID can thwart thefts from the library’s more than 15,000 books and track its collection.
Bautista will lead the celebration on Monday, Feb. 5, at 8 a.m. at the QCPL within the city hall compound.
Along with the RFID launching, QCPL will also present a new website to access digital books and Quezon City ordinances and resolutions.
Highlighting the event will be the book launch of “QC Milestones: Timeline of Events that Shaped a Great City” published by the Public Library.
“We have broken and continue to break the mediocrity of public libraries. The library understands the changing needs of the community, that is why we have gone beyond print resources. E-books and e-journals are now available,” QCPL head Emelita Villanueva said.
The three-storey library boasts of state-of-the-art data storage, retrieval and archival systems. The facility also has a café and conference room. QCPL also has computers for public use, which are programmed for Online Public Access Catalog, encoding, and web surfing.
“We aim to bridge the physical gap between the library and its users,” Villanueva added.
Bautista wants schoolchildren in communities to have direct access to information. Thus, the Quezon City government under his administration vows to continue to upgrade the city’s public libraries for these to be more technology-driven to increase the employability of the residents.
“What’s important is these projects become functional, for people to converge in libraries so they can be more educated and updated with useful information. Ironically, technology is also what’s blocking libraries – instead of reading books, youngsters prefer to mingle with the latest advances and state of the art paraphernalia,” the mayor said.
The Quezon City Public Library is on the list of most modern and cozy libraries in Metro Manila as cited by Spot.ph.