Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln

 

Date of this Version

Winter 1-2022

Abstract

Knowledge cannot be separated from the people holding it and the best way to make it appreciated is to present it in a way that represents the beliefs, customs and norms of its origin. This submission makes this paper attempts to find the perfect word between indigenisation and decolonisation as a way of developing Indigenous Librarianship in Nigeria. It settles for indigenisation because indigenisation focuses on the exploitation of the native, local resources to create, share, transform and retain knowledge. It ponders on the historical antecedents of Librarianship in Nigeria to proof that the Nigerian library practices were purely nurtured in the waters of colonialism. It argues that since the practices of Librarianship within any culture are not universal, though they may be normative within that culture, the practices of Indigenous Librarianship can be used for reflecting culturally conditioned notions of the Nigerian IK and its representations through the Nigerian Librarianship. It suggests bibliographic citation and compilation, cataloguing and classification and library automation as areas of Librarianship that can be indigenised. It concludes that libraries thrived in societies where their practices are hinged on IK and recommends that Nigerian librarians should devise a system of describing, codifying and representing local knowledge and its channels of communication in a way that depicts their original contents as against the artificial description and representation imposed on them by the foreign subject organisation and document description schemes.

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