Agencies train librarians in software application

The Librarians Registration Council of Nigeria on Friday said that it was making efforts to bridge the skills gap in information and communication technologies among librarians.

Its effort, it said, was in collaboration with the National Information Technology Development Agency.

To this end, the two organisations stated that they had organised a workshop on application of Free and Open Source Software in library operations.

According to them, the workshop was aimed to arm librarians with skills to become key players in the Information and Communication Technology sector, able to deploy and apply the ICTs to improve the lot of all information seekers.

The Registrar and Chief Executive Officer of LRCN, Dr. Victoria Okojie, said the council was committed to ensuring that information professionals in Nigeria were at par with their counterparts in developed countries of the world.

It is in line with this wider picture that the council considered it appropriate to partner with the foremost public IT organisation, NITDA, in seeking to equip Information professionals and managers with competencies and skills that would enable them to choose and work with free and open source software in their libraries, Okojie said.

She said that financial resources available to libraries were not sufficient, hence only very few could afford to provide proprietary software to users.

The LRCN registrar stated that free and open source software is free, accessible and easy to maintain, but stated that most librarians were not informed of their availability and lacked requisite skills to deploy the facilities.

This skills-gap is what the workshop seeks to fill. Our desire is to train the over 4000 certified librarians in Nigeria if the resources are available, she said.

Our correspondent gathered that the workshop organised by the two bodies explored the possibilities FOSS offers for modernising Nigerian libraries and to facilitate information sharing and also strengthen technical capacity in deploying FOSS tools such as DSpace, Greenstone, Koha and CDS/ISIS.

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Agencies train librarians in software application