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John Walsh
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Debal Kar Receives 2011 ProQuest & Dialog
Member Achievement Award
For Increasing SLA's Visibility and Success in India and Across Asia
Alexandria, Virginia, 16 August 2011 - The Special Libraries Association's (SLA) Asian Chapter comprises information professionals from more than 20 countries. The challenges of bringing these librarians together are formidable, but Debal Kar has overcome them on several occasions.
For his efforts, Debal received the 2011 ProQuest & Dialog Member Achievement Award at the SLA 2011 Annual Conference. The award recognizes an SLA member who has raised visibility, awareness, and appreciation of the information profession, an SLA chapter or division, and the association at large.
Perhaps most notable among Debal's numerous achievements is his organization of the first International Conference of the SLA Asian Chapter in New Delhi (2008). The conference drew 400-plus information professionals from 18 countries and featured 75 paper-presentations, 4 keynote addresses, and several energetic panel discussions. Besides bringing members of the Asian Chapter together to converse and share insights, the conference took an important step toward increasing SLA's international scope.
Tim Wahlberg, general manager of Dialog and vice president of corporate markets for ProQuest said, "As a global provider of information services, ProQuest and Dialog are especially pleased to honor Debal Kar for his significant achievements in increasing the presence and reach of the SLA Asian Chapter."
More about Debal Kar
Dr. Debal Kar is a fellow of the library and information center at The Energy Resources Institute in New Delhi, India. Since joining SLA in 2005, he has taken an active leadership role within the association and, more specifically, its Asian Chapter. Debal was quickly elected to the chapter's board of directors, serving as secretary in 2005, and was elected chapter president in 2008. Following his term as president, he continued to lead the chapter as membership chair in 2009.
In addition to organizing the 2008 conference, Debal was instrumental in planning the Asian Chapter's first significant event, a 2005 conference on IT applications in special libraries. The conference drew 250-plus participants to India, more than double the projected attendance. As soon as this conference ended, Debal began planning another major chapter event, the Benchmarking and Best Practices in Special Libraries Conference, held in February 2007. That conference drew (again) a much-larger-than-expected-attendance of 300 information professionals, leading to the successful International Conference of the SLA Asian Chapter in 2008.
Debal is a member of SLA's Environment & Resource Management, Social Science, and Science and Technology Divisions. He also writes for and helps distribute the Asian Chapter's newsletter and has created various awards and scholarships to send library and information science students from Asia to SLA conferences in the United States.
Aside from his involvement with SLA, Debal is a recognized leader in the library community of India. He has more than 25 years of experience as a library director, scholar, educator, author, speaker, and government advisor to India's library and specialized information sector. The ProQuest & Dialog Member Achievement Award is the latest of his many honors--Debal received SLA's Diversity Leadership Development Program Award in 2007 and an SLA Presidential Citation in 2009 from former President Gloria Zamora. He is also actively involved in the Indian Library Association and the Indian Association of Special Libraries and Information Centres.
About Dialog (www.dialog.com)
ProQuest's business unit Dialog pioneered online searching in advance of the internet. As the global leader in providing mission-critical information that drives innovation by professionals of all kinds including scientists, engineers, legal practitioners and business analysts, Dialog is renowned for enabling precision search of content from the world's most authoritative publishers. Sources include deep repositories of scientific, technical and biomedical literature, patents and trademarks, and thousands of industry, news and company information sources - now being made accessible through the powerful and intuitive ProQuest Dialog? search service on the new ProQuest platform.
About ProQuest (www.proquest.com)
ProQuest connects people with vetted, reliable information. Key to serious research, the company has forged a 70-year reputation as a gateway to the world's knowledge - from dissertations to governmental and cultural archives to news, in all its forms. Its role is essential to libraries and other organizations whose missions depend on the delivery of complete, trustworthy information. This energetic, fast-growing organization includes the Summon? web-scale discovery service, the new ProQuest Dialog? service, and business units ebrary®, Serials Solutions®, RefWorks-COS?, and Bowker®.
About SLA
The Special Libraries Association (SLA) is a nonprofit global organization for innovative information professionals and their strategic partners. SLA serves more than 9,000 members in 75 countries in the information profession, including corporate, academic and government information specialists. SLA promotes and strengthens its members through learning, advocacy and networking initiatives. For more information, visit www.sla.org.
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