Human Capacity Building in Nigerian Higher Education Sector: Imperative for Academic Libraries Contribution Towards National Development.

Chinwe Veronica Anunobi Dr, Nnamdi Azikiwe University Awka Nigeria

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 form of indigenous resources and provides it for education and research. This responsibility was carried out with print until the turn of century that ushered in ICT. Consequently, the intellectual heritage becomes ubiquitous without bound in space and time. Further to that, the role of academic libraries though still remains the same fundamentally but changed in the ways and means of actualization. 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 response from twelve federal university libraries shows that they have well developed staff capacity development policy which are variously 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 pride of place in national development. Recommendations are made based on the findings.