Accessibility Of Malay Traditional Islamic Literature Through The Development Of Virtual Union Catalogue System As Post-Pandemic Solution

Despite the physical and movement restrictions due to the preventive measure during the COVID-19 pandemic, knowledge seekers, researchers, and scholars continue to delve themselves into research activities – defining, planning, searching, locating, organizing, gathering, analysing and reporting of academic and scholarly outputs. Each research phase is crucial to them (i.e., the researchers and scholars) to ensure a well-written proposal preparation, obtaining the institutional and ethical approval, funding for their research project. In this complicated and critical situation, the researchers are greatly in need of assistance from the academic librarians throughout their research cycle. The assistance can come in the form of just-in-time, personal, customised services or ready research reference which is made available virtually to the researchers. Thus, this paper is an attempt to propose the development of virtual union catalogue of Malay traditional Islamic literature via adapting a well-known Melvyl union catalogue model system. This proposal could be valued from the economic aspect especially when the whole country, and even globally, is under pressure of budget cut. Even though this initiative may involve large effort, the benefit outweighs the huge preparation of the work.