The Changing Roles of Librarians for Research Support Services in Evolving Landscape of Higher Education in Nigeria

Abstract

The roles of librarians are ever-changing in response to the new service demands and expectations of researchers, resulting from the rapid advancement in technology. The new technologies and methods of service delivery are available for deployment in libraries, thus helping librarians to remain relevant in the evolving landscape of higher education in Nigeria. The traditional roles such as acquisition, organization, and preservation played by librarians in higher educational institutions are no longer adequate to support teaching, learning and research activities. The purpose of this paper therefore, is to explore the emerging challenges encountered by researchers in Nigerian higher institutions of learning. Some of the challenges include poor search skills required for harnessing information resources to support research process, and difficulty of access to research data, non-inclusion of librarians among decision making bodies. The paper also highlights the changing roles of librarians in meeting specific researchers’ needs. Such roles include emphasis on embedded librarianship, increased visibility and integration of librarians into research and publication decision making bodies, knowledge creation and dissemination of scholarly initiatives and focus on service delivery that can meet the potential researchers’ needs. The argument in this paper is that librarians will always remain relevant if they develop their skills to be able to meet the needs of the 21stcentury library clients. The paper therefore, recommends the need for librarians to repackage their services in line with present demand as and global best practices.