Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Date of this Version
Summer 6-27-2022
Document Type
Article
Abstract
The study investigated acquisition of 21st century librarianship skills by librarians in public university libraries in Bayelsa and Rivers States of Nigeria. Specifically, the study assessed the kinds of 21st century librarianship skills, skills acquisition methods and skills acquisition challenges acquired/adopted/encountered by the librarians. The study adopted descriptive survey research design. The population of the study comprised sixty-six (66) librarians of five public university libraries in Bayelsa and Rivers States of Nigeria. The study did not carry out sampling because the population was small and manageable. The instrument for data collection was the Survey Monkey version of an online questionnaire. The instrument was validated by two experts in the Department of Library and Information Science in Niger Delta University, Bayelsa State. The researcher distributed sixty-six soft copies of the draft of the validated questionnaire to the librarians via social media platforms such as whatsapp groups of the surveyed university libraries, state chapter whatsapp groups of the Nigerian Library Association to which the librarians belong, librarians’ personal whatsapp accounts and email addresses. Fifty-three (53) questionnaires were properly completed by the librarians and returned, resulting in a response rate of 80.30%. The data collected were transferred into Google sheets and analyzed by means of weighted mean and standard deviation. Findings revealed that emailing, word processing, internet surfing skills/digital literacy and social networking skills were the 21st century librarianship skills acquired by the librarians. Furthermore, it showed that colleagues’ assistance and training at work place were the methods adopted by the librarians in acquiring 21st century librarianship skills. Finally, it indicated that poor funding of libraries, lack of funds to develop oneself, poor ICT infrastructure, managerial negative attitude to personnel development and non-availability of digital library courses in Library and Information Science curriculum were the challenges the librarians encountered in acquiring 21st century librarianship skills. The study suggested that university library management should organize internal and external digital training programmes for their personnel and the National Universities Commission should collaborate with Library and Information Science (LIS) Departments in Nigeria to fine-tune the LIS curriculum to reflect 21st century librarianship skills and practice.
Comments
A paper on the above topic was submitted to LPP for publication on the 26th of June, 2022 by the same authors. The submitted content had some serious flaws which were detected and corrected and the corrected paper, which is this paper, is resent to LPP for publication on 27th June, 2022. Thus, the administrators of LPP should disregard the earlier paper and use this corrected paper instead. Many thanks.