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Call for urgent ‘e-volution’ of university libraries

2018/10/08 10:40:58 AM

Universities in Sub-Saharan Africa need to move away from the idea of libraries as buildings that stock books on dusty shelves to learning spaces that can facilitate access for students

AFRICA

Wachira Kigotho 
05 October 2018 University World News Global Edition Issue 523

Universities in Sub-Saharan Africa need to move away from the idea of libraries as buildings that stock books on dusty shelves to learning spaces that can facilitate access for students, academics and researchers to information at any time or place. For those libraries to attain cutting-edge status, however, they need to be properly funded. 

Speaking at the 13th International Conference and Exhibition on ICT for Education, Training and Skills Development, held in Kigali, Rwanda, on September 28, Professor Miriam Conteh-Morgan, deputy librarian at the University of Sierra Leone, said vice-chancellors and other university leaders rarely recognise the value of libraries.

“Most university leaders take libraries as book warehouses instead of strengthening them to become central partners in academic learning and research enterprise,” said Conteh-Morgan. 

She noted that while users of library services in developed countries operate in both the physical and virtual worlds, this is not the case for users in Sub-Saharan Africa, where they mostly have to go to a physical library to read and borrow books, or get access to other library services. 

Need to embrace new platforms

According to Conteh-Morgan, there is an urgent need for university libraries in Sub-Saharan Africa to embrace modern information and communication technology platforms that would allow librarians to deliver information services more efficiently. She noted that with the availability of high-performance computer servers, broadband fibre connectivity and mobile digital devices – including smartphones, laptops and computer tablets – access to library services can be enhanced.

What emerged at the session at eLearning Africa 2018, “Reinventing Academic Libraries in Sub-Saharan Africa”, is that modernised university libraries can move beyond managing books on shelves to become centres for research and academic journal publishing. 

Amid efforts to close the gaps in academic research, university libraries could become data centres and open institutional repositories for theses, dissertations and academic research papers, some of which might not have been published elsewhere outside the region.

However, according to the Directory of Open Access Repositories, or OpenDOAR, a listing of open access repositories around the world, based at the Centre for Research Communications at the University of Nottingham, there are only 18 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa with a total of 120 repositories.

Peter Siyao, a librarian at Mzumbe University in Tanzania, commented in his study, Academic Libraries in Four Sub-Saharan Africa Countries and Their Role in Propagating Open Science, that “this is a very small contribution which may be associated with the presence of few countries in Sub-Saharan Africa having institutional repositories”.

Open repositories are key

According to Siyao, open institutional repositories are key to opening up the research output of a university to a worldwide audience and hence to maximising a university’s visibility on the global stage to interested constituencies that include prospective staff, potential students and others.

In a presentation entitled “Academic Libraries in eLearning Environments: A collaborative approach”, Dr Buhle Mbambo-Thata, the director of resource development at the Pretoria-based African Library and Information Associations and Institutions, urged African universities to start utilising the expertise of librarians to publish academic journals and academic monograms.

“The collection, curation and preservation of learning and research materials has become a larger mandate for academic libraries globally,” said Mbambo-Thata.

In the past two decades, traditional library services have been giving way to e-library delivery services that are embedded in digital platforms. For instance, catalogues have been digitised to make the search for physical books and other learning materials easier. In more advanced libraries, state-of-the-art services – including online public access catalogues, e-books, virtual reference services and electronic inter-library lending – have been established.

Expert pool in libraries is shallow

Unfortunately, in most academic libraries at African universities, the expert pool is shallow, said Conteh-Morgan, and there was an urgent need to revamp libraries both in terms of human capacity building and broadband connectivity.

“In the 21st century there is a paradigm shift in the academic librarian’s role, beyond traditional manual cataloguing and taking care of books,” said Conteh-Morgan.

More than ever before, university librarians are assuming new roles as knowledge and information managers, in addition to becoming partners in learning and research, she said. 

Students and academics rely heavily upon librarians, not just for their skills in storing and lending books, but as research supporters and advisers on copyright issues, plagiarism, research literature reviews and academic data processing management.

Librarian training hindered

However, whereas academic libraries in developed countries are pushing ahead, most of their counterparts in Sub-Saharan Africa remain locked in financial crises that hinder the proper training of librarians. As Conteh-Morgan pointed out, most academic libraries in the region lack adequate learning resources, such as quality textbooks and journals. 

In reference to a study conducted by Priti Jain, a professor of library and information studies at the University of Botswana, in collaboration with Dr Akakandelwa Akakandelwa of the department of library and information sciences at the University of Zambia, Conteh-Morgan said governments in Sub-Saharan Africa should formulate ICT policies to make ICT tools available. 

According to their paper, Challenges of Twenty-First Century Academic Libraries in Africa, it should become a priority for universities to provide adequate resources to academic libraries, including finance, ICT infrastructure and training.