Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Collection Development
Collection Development
At the right time and in the hands of the right people, information can
help to ensure the effective use of other resources. According to the
IDRC report ( 1986), it is the “master resource of our time, the chief
raw material and principal product ofmodern economies”. Information
is the focal point of several activities. As Ting put it,3 unfortunately,
information is all too often treated by all of us as the air we breathe. It
is omnipresent, accepted and relied upon, but seldom examined too
closely.
It is a recognized stipulation that a university library’s collection
should be of sufficient size and scope to support the university’s total
instructional needs and to facilitate the research programmes. The
university library’s collection shall not only be developed within the
terms of explicit and detailed policies, but shall contain all the varied
forms of recorded knowledge.4 Even though these stipulations are the
model for such libraries, and are in fact, guiding principles for col-
*Assistant Librarian, Centre for IGBO Studies, ho State University, P M B 2000, Okigwe,
Nigeria.
COLLECTIONS DEVELOPMENT:
THE STATE OF THE ARGUMENT
James Thompson wrote (not about Nigeria),
“the problems may have started with inflation, and may still have a lot to do with
inflation, but the cuts which are going to hurt most in the next two to three years
are directly related to the screwing-down by the government, for economic and
political reasons, of the expansion of high education. The result in my opinion is
that this country is now well on the road to becoming a kind of backwater, intel-
lectually and academically, starved of all sorts of research facilities, including library
materials”.’
could not meet its book requirements from its internal resources and
they recommended an interim measure of book importation for 5 years.
It would appear that, in reality, this recommendation was never
implemented. This is only one aspect of the problem, since anybody
can bear witness to the unbelievably high costs of books. It was suc-
cinctly put by the African Guardian: “millions of books are warming the
walls because people cannot afford them, due to high prices”.” It was
further stated that, “acquisition of materials for academic libraries have
been beleaguered by many difficulties.. . not to talk of the dwindling
financial resources available to the parent institution.. . The current
SAP and SFEM conditions have brought the harrowing conditions to
a state of permanent coma”.23
This is more or less a summary of the state of collections development
in Nigerian University libraries. Tamuno painted a gloomy picture of
the situation when she said, “in one of the nation’s oldest universities
subscription for the current year stands at 3 17 titles. The drop from the
pre-SAP intake of 6130 was considerable”.‘4 Many academic libraries
in Nigeria have not acquired much in the way of reading materials in
the past 2 or 3 years as journal subscriptions and monograph prices
skyrocketed in the wake of the Naira adjustment.
This brings us to the National Universities Commission (NUC) stipu-
lation that libraries should be given 5oj, of the total university budget.
It is no secret that during the last 5 years, no library has received
the NUC specified percentage (perhaps with the exception of Bayer0
University Library, Kano, which gets between 7-8% of their total
university budget). In Imo State University for instance, the library
does not benefit from such an allowance. Of the W9.5 million university
budget in 1988, nothing was made available to the library for that year.
That year, the 941 items received were acquired with money approved
in 1986.
Collections development in most university libraries in Nigeria is
nothing to write home about. The Imo State University Library has
only 18045 volumes collected during the years that it has been open:
198 1 ( 1493 volumes) ; 1982 (2922 volumes) ; 1983 ( 1948 volumes) ; 1984
(1363 volumes); 1985 (4028 volumes); 1986 (1316 volumes); 1987 (2722
volumes); 1988 (941 volumes); 1989 (1310 volumes).28 This shows that
during the 9 years since its inception, it has been able to acquire, on
the average, about 2004.9 volumes (11 .l 1%). This figure is ridiculous
when compared with the University of Ibadan journal titles sub-
scription of 6130 yearly, or in a world where millions of volumes of
books and other information materials are published annually.
Perhaps with the exception of the University of Ibadan, which
employed a librarian for a year before the University College was
COLLECTIONS DEVELOPMENT IN ACADEMIC LIBRARIES 127
opened, universities have made little or no effort to establish a worth-
while library before starting their academic programmes. The end-
result is that these libraries fail to provide adequately for the users. Imo
State University Library, for instance, is pitiable as there are no proper
provisions for post-graduate studies, sandwich programmes, and the
horde of courses in education. Be that as it may, one is bound to ask
what options lie open for librarians in the face of non-compliance in
the allocation of the NUC prescribed 5% of the total university budget
to the library?
Most librarians have engaged themselves in various activities geared
towards attracting donations. For instance, Oyeoku26 received about
35 cartons of books, valued at about $8000 free-of-charge, through
his personal connections with Michigan State University. The United
States Information Service (USIS) in collaboration with Emerson Elec-
trical Company made donations of books in chemistry, food science,
etc., valued at $20000. In 1983, Chief W. I. Onyejiaka made a donation
of about 4000 law books. Also, most of the books belonging to the
former Imo State House of Assembly were willed to the library. The
British Council has donated books in English and chemical engineering.
Oyeoku is planning a “massive book-injection programme” which, it
is hoped, will come to fruition in 1991. Under this scheme, the university
library will receive books from individuals, publishers, libraries, and so
on (both in Nigeria and abroad), without fee.
Although these can serve, at least for now, as alternative sources in
collections development, it in no way solves the problems of university
libraries. As Oyeoku put it, “For a university to have credibility, it has
to develop its library and laboratory.“27 May Caesar’s lack of caution
remind us of the need for it. Similarly, may our lack of a proper
collections development programme always remind us of the need for
one.
It is not within the ambition of this paper to delve into the history of
the means of developing library collections, thus they will be discussed
as briefly, though clearly, as possible. It must be realized that this list
is not in any way exhaustive. The means include:
(a) Weeding. The English word “weed” was first and foremost
applied to the field of agriculture where it was used to mean “a plant
growing where it is not wanted”. By the now familiar terminology
transfer, it was applied in library and information studies to mean the
removal of unwanted or little-used books from the librarv shelves. The
128 OKECHUKWU M. OKORO
fact is that many libraries are so full that new books simply cannot be
crowded onto the shelves, so some have to be discarded.2R Weeding is
a poor word for this process, since it implies that these books were
unwanted in the first place. The British term “thinning”‘” suggests
removing the less healthy so that the better works can have a chance
to stand out and be used. The problem here is that in Nigerian university
libraries, weeding, ifdone at all, is very skeletal. In Imo State University
Library, the concept is not considered important. In fact, weeding has
not been carried out since the library started.
(b) Collection evaluation. Evaluation means, “to determine the
value of something”.30 The usefulness of any collection can be deter-
mined by looking at how well the library satisfies its patrons’ or users’
needs. In the words of Okoro, “an elegant library building is a white
elephant unless it houses materials appropriate for its users”, “a soph-
isticated system for information retrieval is pointless if it affords access
to the wrong documents”, “ an impressive structure ofstaff management
is a luxury unless it organizes staff in a way which facilitates the library’s
main purpose”.” These are only reminders of the importance of col-
lections evaluation. Academic library evaluation occurs in three ways:32
(i) as part of an accreditation procedure; (ii) as a survey by an outside
consultant; and (iii) as an in-house self-evaluation.
Eva.luation of collections in libraries has always been a difficult task.
The primary reason is that there are no quantitative measures of output
in which librarians have great confidence. At Imo State University, no
evaluation of the collection has been carried out. The reasons for this
include the fact that the library collection is not large enough to evalu-
ate. Thus collection evaluation work will be a wasteful exercise; the
present collection was selected very cautiously, making it unnecessary
to evaluate a “life” collection.
However, it is proper to mention that there are five suggested ways
by which a library collection can be evaluated. They are:
(a) Finance. As Afre (1983) put it: “Finance is the lifeblood of any
service. “33 Nigeria is a developing nation with not only a low per capita
income but with huge external debts. The situation is not helped by
the high illiteracy rate. The sum-total of these handicaps is that people
do not have the reading habits necessary for effective library devel-
opment. Libraries are thus starved of vital funds that should be used in
developing their collections. Needless to say this problem has now
become perennial and may linger for sometime to come. As we observed
earlier, this is a biting problem in the Imo State University Library.
(b) Foreign exchange control regulations (government policies).
What can be said here is that the foreign exchange control regulations
of Nigeria, which have been subject to constant changes, modifications
and amendments since the outbreak of the Nigerian Civil War in
July 1967, have been a constant headache to the Nigerian librarian,
especially the university librarian. On account of the large scale abuses
and malpractices that resulted from the short-lived liberalization of the
foreign exchange regulations in 1974, the Federal Government had to
introduce the Comprehensive Import Supervision Scheme, effective
from January, 1979, to check malpractices. The implementation of the
scheme under which most imports were to be inspected before shipment
and which was again amended in May 1982, requires that a Nigerian
130 OKECHUKWIJ M. OKORO
REFERENCES