Bridging the Gap between Town and Gown: Role of Librarians in Community Service Initiatives

Abstract

Purpose-The purpose of this paper was to review related literature on community service initiatives, benefits and the involvement of librarians in Community service programme with a focus on the University of Port Harcourt Community Service programme. This review was also undertaken to establish a link between the Community Service programme and purposeful librarianship.Methodology-Related literature was reviewed on involvement of academic librarians in community service programmes/initiatives in Universities with a focus on University of Port Harcourt community service programme.Findings-Community service programmes and initiatives play an essential role in linking students with host communities and provide the opportunities and prospects for the development of entrepreneurial skills. This paper highlighted the benefits of community service activities to all the stakeholders. It also exposed the problem of little or non-involvement of librarians in community service initiatives. This problem is more pronounced in Nigeria where librarians of all categories are not involved.Originality-This is a baseline review as no such paper has been written on this topic. Thus, it provides the basic information needed for further studies in this area.

Perception of Librarians on COVID-19 Information and Sensitization

“…Featherstone, Lyon, and Ruffin (2008) identified roles of librarians in periods of disasters as institutional supporters, collection managers, information disseminators, internal planners, community supporters, government partners, educators/trainers, and information community builders. Emasealu and Umeozor (2015) urge librarians to be more proactive by playing a dominant role in providing solutions to community problems and needs; educate the populace in order to reinforce change behaviour; adapt to changing conditions and appropriately address concerns and fears of the community in times of tragedies of this kind.…”

“…Table 3 shows further that the library sharing information via social media and formulating questions and answers about COVID-19 pandemic as a means of sensitizing the community was carried out by a few institutions (23.1%). Emasealu and Umeozor (2015) urge librarians to be more proactive by playing a dominant role in providing solutions to community problems and needs; educate the populace. Apparently, a few of the institutions also developed disaster planning strategies, and maintained social distance among library staff and users as a method of carrying out the sensitization on the pandemic.…”