Level of awareness and adoption of UNESCO conservation guidelines preservation practices by the University Library staff in south eastern Nigeria

Abstract

United Nations Educational, Scientific and cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2000 designed guidelines for carrying out conservation practices to ensure that significant library materials, published and unpublished, in all formats, will be conserved in accessible form. These guidelines are expected to be used by the library staff for preservation practices. Therefore, this study was carried out to determine the extent of awareness and adoption of the UNESCO conservation guidelines, preservation practices among the library staff. in the South –Eastern Nigerian Universities. Two research questions guided this study while one (1) hypothesis was tested at 0.05 level of significance. The study design adopted for this study was Survey research design with target area on university library staff in south east Nigeria. The population of the study consisted 623 university library staff excluding private universities The method of simple random sampling without replacement (SRSWOR) scheme was used to select independent samples of 300 university library staff (about 48% of library staff). The use of the SRSWOR procedure ensured that the sample is a random sample and a good representation of the entire population. The instrument for data collection was questionnaire, which was subjected to a reliability test using the cronbach alpha statistics which gave an alpha value of α=0.81. The study found that the extent of awareness of the UNESCO conservation guideline preservation practices by the university library staff in south east universities and the extent of adoption of preservation practices in the UNESCO Conservation Guidelines by university library staff in South-East Nigeria was below average. It was however recommended that the University  Management should conduct workshops, seminars and conferences for university library staff on the UNESCO Conservation Guidelines preservation practices to enable them acquire more and balanced knowledge needed in using the UNESCO Conservation Guidelines. The university should provide an enabling environment to help the university library staff work effectively and use the UNESCO Conservation Guidelines in their preservation practices. There should be adequate funding of conferences and seminars by the government for staff improvement.