Human Capacity Building in Nigerian University Libraries: An Imperative for Academic Libraries’ Contribution towards National Development

Abstract

The place of the academic library in national development cannot be underestimated. Despite its central role in nurturing tomorrow’s leaders, it preserves for posterity a country’s intellectual heritage in the form of indigenous resources and provides for education and research. This responsibility was carried out with print until the turn of century which ushered in ICT. Consequently, the intellectual heritage becomes ubiquitous without being bound to space and time. Further to that, the role of academic libraries still remains the same fundamentally but is changed in the ways and means of actualisation. By implication, the human capacity needed for such changing roles changed. Hence, a survey was carried out to determine the efforts of Nigerian university libraries towards ensuring staff capacity with focus on the availability of policy for staff development in Nigerian university libraries, the extent of the policy implementation, the challenges to these efforts and ways of ensuring sustainable policy development and implementation. Questionnaire responses from twelve federal university libraries show that they have well developed staff capacity development policies which are implemented especially in the areas of justification for training, responsibility for training, category of staff to be trained, type of training, method of training, documentation of training, as well as the location of training. Finance and lack of professional collaboration are considered the major challenges to effective capacity building needed for the libraries to assume their rightful place in national development. Recommendations are made based on the findings.