Jack Cabangal: A Librarian In a Making

Jack Cabangal: A Librarian In a Making

By

Melchor F. Cichon

November 28, 2012

"I think librarianship here in the Philippines is not yet appreciated and it is still unknown to a lot of people."

This is the answer of Jack Cabangal, the Chief Librarian/Archivist of  the College of St. John-Roxas.

Jack was born in Leon, Iloilo on March 4, 1991, where she graduated with honors in her grade schools.  She continued her education at Leon National High School.

After high school, she enrolled at Central Philippines University where she graduated with a degree of Bachelor of Library Science and Information Science Batch 2011.  Immediately after finishing her college degree, she worked as Assistant Librarian at College of St. John-Roxas. The following year, she became the Chief Librarian/Archivist of the same college until today.

When I asked her why she took library science, she told me: “Actually,  Sir, library science is not my first choice. I had no choice, actually. Since my aunt was supporting my studies, I had no choice but to follow her wishes.”

Eventually, Jack started to love the profession. She however feels that librarians are being paid less. She believes that librarians should be paid higher because librarians play an important role in any academic institution.

Comparatively speaking, the initial salary of a newly licensed librarian is between P14,000 to P20,000 a month. This is even much higher than the salaries being received by most nurses in the Philippines today.

We know that librarians make the lives of the students, faculty and researcher s easier by providing them adequate and up-to-date reading materials in the shortest time possible.  In addition, there are some librarians who serve as thesis advisers. They also help advertise their respective institution through their fast and efficient services.

Jack said that if only our people will recognize the importance of the librarians in helping develop the potentials of our students, then a lot of our parents will encourage their children to take up library science as one of the options in taking up a college degree. Unfortunately, until now many of our high school students and their parents are not aware that there is such a degree as Bachelor of Library and Information Science. That is also one of the reasons why our country is not producing enough library science graduates. Because of this, hundreds of our elementary, high school and college libraries do not have librarians in their respective libraries. As a result, many of the books, magazines, and other library materials are not properly cataloged or indexed. The worst thing to happen is the absence of catalog.

The internet is of course a very valuable source of information to our students. But many students do not know the websites that are considered reliable. They are mostly confined to the popular websites as provided by Yahoo and Google search engines.  That is where the skills and talents of the librarians come in. In fact many college students are not knowledgeable in making their bibliographies or citations for their term papers. That is also another aspect wherein the librarians can help our students develop their research capabilities.

Jack is still young, but her perceptions on librarianship need deeper analysis.