NLN - Nigerbiblios

Nigerbiblios
Volume 24, No. 1 & 2 Jan. - Dec. 2016

Pages 20 - 62

Collection Development Practices in Academic Libraries in Niger State

Joel Jiya Kolo

Abstract

This research is on Collection Development practices in Academic Libraries in Niger State, Nigeria. There has been a rapid expansion of higher education in the country, particularly in the last ten years. This expansion also leads to the need of large amount of reading materials. These reading materials are required by both students and lecturers for learning, teaching, research and development and even publications. Hence, the knowledge of collection development practices comes to bare in providing such information resources. This is why collection development should be a core course in Library and Information Science. How collection development practices are employed to provide information resources in the libraries is the problem of this study. The objective is to determine the various methods adopted for collection development, to identify the persons who participate in it, to determine the problems of collection development, and to identify agencies that donate reading materials to the library. It is also to determine their community analysis, weeding and evaluation practices. The research instruments used are questionnaires, observation and documentary sources. The population of the study is seventeen (17) academic libraries, while seven (7) were sampled. The researcher used simple percentages and table to analyse the data. Findings revealed that 88.9% of the libraries studied still use the method of purchases only. The study also showed that 95.9% of the libraries employed purchases, gifts and donations. Findings as well revealed that collection development still remains a professional responsibility of librarians (51.4%) in academic libraries studied. It was also discovered that Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) were not used in collection development activities in all the libraries studied.

Keyword(s)

information and communication technologies, collection development practices, icts, academic libraries in niger state

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