The ILO Subregional office for the Caribbean, has been operating in Trinidad and Tobago since 1969 and serves 13 ILO member states and 8 non-metropolitan territories of the English and Dutch speaking Caribbean.
The Office is staffed by a team of experts who provide technical advice and assistance, training and information support to its constituents in the region.
In January 2000, The ILO subregional office for the Caribbean (ILO) and the Cipriani College of Labour and Cooperative Studies entered into its first cooperation agreement for the provision of library services at the College.
On January 2008, a library was built specifically to house the ILO Collection and this library is now open to all registered students, staff at the College and members of the public who have been referred to the Library by the ILO
The rationale is that the philosophy of the ILO matches that of the College and since there is a long-standing history between the two organisations, it was fitting to provide library services to further enhance teaching and learning at the College.
With the restructuring of the College in February 2019, the ILO library has now been relocated to the ground floor of the main building central core within the Elma Francois Library.
New ILO publications are received from both Geneva and the ILO subregional office for the Caribbean at least every three months. The Collection consists of:
Subjects covered by the collection include;
Information Retrieval
The ILO librarian provides assistance to retrieve ILO related information from a variety of online and offline databases.
The ILO librarian answers all queries directed to the ILO Library in person and by email.
A photocopying machine is available in the main Elma Francois Library for the copying of ILO items at a cost of 35 cents per page.
Printing of documents is available via the copier/printer at the main Elma Francois library. Students must email the documents to print@cclcs.edu.tt. and subsequently make payments and collect the documents at the Circulation counter.
The ILO library transfers documents to users at their request via email attachments. These include PDF documents, Conference reports, Conventions and Recommendations and other types of documents that have been found using the ILO database.
The ILO library periodically distributes pamphlets, newsletters and brochures in print form (hardcopy) to all users on their request (free of charge)
Initially, all books in the ILO library were for reference only, however, with the revision of the Cooperation agreement between the ILO and the College in December 2015, some of the books in the collection are now available for lending.
The lending convention used in the Elma Francois library applies to the ILO library in that books with the red dots on the spine are not available for lending, those with the green dots are available for lending for one week, while those without any tags are available for two weeks. Overdue charges of $1.00 per day for books kept beyond the due date are enforced.
However, different from the Elma Francois library, all students from those enrolled in the bachelor’s degree to the certificate programmes, staff and others are allowed to borrow a maximum of two books at a time.
Renewals can be made either in person or via telephone and can be done only once as long as the item has not been requested or put on hold by another user.
The ILO library provides a special service of ordering books on behalf of regular users. There is a special form located in the Library that is to be filled out by the purchaser for this purpose with all the details of the order. This will then be sent to the ILO office and when the order has been filled, the documents can be collected at the ILO office in Port of Spain. By using this facility there is a 35% discount on the cost price of the items.
The rationale is that the philosophy of the ILO matches that of the College and since there is a long-standing history between the two organisations, it was fitting to provide library services to further enhance teaching and learning at the College.
