It’s Time to Give Back : The role of Corporate Social Responsibility in Supporting Library Development in Indonesia

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a wider acceptance among companies for their social obligations. It suggested that a company serves not only for a profit making function but also obligation of a service to the community and to the society as a whole. The same consciousness had also grown among companies in Indonesia. Under “Tanggung Jawab Sosial Perusahaan (Corporate Social Responsibility)” or “Program Kemitraan dan Bina Lingkungan (hereafter shortened to PKBL), they have started to make Corporate Social Responsibility program. Such program had been studied by Zaidi and Abidin, who identified four patterns in CSR practices in Indonesia i.e : direct involvement, corporation’s social organization; partnership with other institutions, or by joining a consortium (Saidi and Abidin, 2004). Among the many sectors of the CSR program is education, particularly library development. One of the organization who work hand in hand with the companies in doing CSR, especially in developing libraries in Indonesia is Yayasan Pengembangan Perpustakaan Indonesia (hereafter is called YPPI). The reason why those companies develop such program is because they are concerned with Indonesian human resources quality and community’s quality of life. They believed one of the many ways to improve these is by providing bettter education facilities. This is the reason why they want to give access to library services for Indonesian. They hope that through the program, people will have more access to good readings and various informations, thus, leading to human resources development. Their commitment is proved by their support to the improvement of library facilities, library staff training and library activities. Nevertheless, there is only limited number of companies who have a CSR on developing library, and the financial contribution is very little compared to the budgets for CSR in other sectors. These should be seen as an opportunity for libraries, since there will be more and more companies are joining the trend of CSR. Furthermore, the constitutional court has decided that CSR is mandatory to firms, thus encouraging more companies to do CSR. How about CSR in library in Indonesia? Do they really do CSR as part of their social obligation? Or is it part or their strategy for a sustainable business? No matter what the main motivation is, as long as, the CSR match library needs and it is a continuing p¬rocess, we can make use of it to develop our library.