Transforming Communities: The Roles of Public Libraries in Nigeria

Abstract

Public libraries are libraries attached to communities to meet the information needs of every stratum in  that community irrespective of their age, sex, religion, tribe, and political affiliation. Public libraries  are funded mainly by the government, private individuals, and other well-meaning donor agencies.  Public libraries are playing great transformational roles in the communities they are serving, some of  such roles include; educational support, political awakening, economic value boost, research assistance,  arousing reading interest, training, and retraining, health awareness promotion, cultural and leisure  development as well as makerspaces to mention only but a few. Despite the enormous transformational  roles of public libraries to their communities, they are still been limited by a lot of challenges, some of  which includes inadequate funding, poor reading culture, staff incompetency, poor remuneration of  library staff, inadequate facilities, decaying infrastructure, epileptic power supply, and inadequate ICT  tools. It is recommended from the study that the government should adequately fund public libraries to  enable them to acquire sufficient information resources and facilities, the government should ensure  librarians and other staff of public libraries are well paid to motivate them to put in their best, and  librarians in public libraries should regularly do community needs assessment to be able to ascertain  areas to channel their programmes. New roles are evolving for public libraries rapidly in this 21st century faced with a lot of societal problems.