Introduction
Harrod’s (2000), defined university library as an structured assortment of publications positioned in a university for the use of instructors and pupils, but ordinarily for pupils. It could comprise textbooks of reference and or books for residence studying and in the care of a qualified librarian, or trainer-librarian. It is variously get in touch with “Educational Components Centre”, “Studying Centre or Media centre.”
The College library serves as a services agency which supports the schools’ goals and provides resources for all subjects and all curiosity of pupils and lecturers. The faculty library is a supportive resource of the faculty curriculum, its provisions, expert services, and improvement is directed at aiding college programmes (Kinnel, 1994).
Libraries generally have as their major purpose attaining, processing, storing and disseminating information to which school library is not an exception. The faculty library has a crucial job to engage in in the data assistance. They give materials applicable to the curricular desires of everyone with the university local community. The great importance of supplying these kinds of methods can not be overemphasized if the university library is to be an instigator of and assistance for resource primarily based understanding in the school.
Also, in relation to details capabilities, the library and its librarian, make readily available elements and providers in diverse kinds to allow both equally pupils and the school neighborhood to use these expertise in obtaining the data they have to have.
The intent and philosophy of school library assistance are quickly being comprehended and accepted by school administrators and teachers. The truth necessitates that the faculty librarian be completely acquainted with these applications this sort of as advice, the reading through programme and the enrichment programme for pupils and lecturers. Even so, Albert Academy library has no skilled and certified librarian, who understands and performs all those functions in purchase to be certain that the support provision is totally attained.
Albert Academy Faculty Library
The Albert Academy was inaugurated on the 4th Oct 1904. It was until 1975 when the Albert Academy Alumni Affiliation in their assembly thought it clever that this kind of a highly regarded institution need to not go without the need of a library as the improvement of university libraries was at its greatest peak at that time. An concept to erect a library making was born with the collaboration of the alumni affiliation and the owners of the college that is the United Methodist Church. The library was established with the goal of having a position the place pupils could go and check out new strategies to even further bolster their faculty curriculum activities and leisure as perfectly.
The library was officially opened to the entire university community by His Excellency the late Dr. Siaka P. Stevens on 4th Oct 1976, then President of the Republic of Sierra Leone and also a member of the Albert Academy Alumni Association course of 1922. The library was named right after him adhering to the enormous contribution he made to creating the library for the college community. The Albert Academy Library has a mission to “Assistance college curriculum routines by giving resources of relevance in the university procedure and to introduce new and improved info sources to help make the school to be in line with fashionable criteria of training.”
The goals of the Albert Academy school library are as follows:
I. To give pupils with library products and products and services most correct and most meaningful in their growth and growth
ii. To participate absolutely in faculty programmes as it strikes to meet up with the requirements of pupils, lecturers, mom and dad and other folks group members
iii. to encourage and tutorial pupils in all phases of their looking at that they may locate rising pleasure and gratification and may well increase in crucial judgment and appreciation
iv. To make available new enhancement and maintain pupils abreast of contemporary trends in training understand reader’s desires and holding them effectively educated in get to generate a effectively dynamic academic setting
v. To function with the instructor in the assortment and generation of instructional resources that meet up with the aims of the curriculum, offer steerage in the use of collection, evaluation of education programmes and supplies, facilitates the locale, organisation and servicing of elements effectively and
vi. To enable pupils to grow to be competent users of libraries and of printed and audio-visual products.
Library Provision at Albert Academy College Library
A main purpose in the information and facts services supplied by contemporary faculty library is in the provision of elements suitable to the curricular requirements of pupils and lecturers. In recent several years, the curriculum actions have moved to another degree, in which the university being supportive useful resource of this movement, need to endeavor to residence a assortment of print and non-print supplies and have entry wherever achievable to digital resources of information and facts which are also component of the info means in the library.
Given the demands of the fashionable university curriculum, the university library ought to now residence a large wide variety of print and non-print materials and have obtain, where doable, to digital resources of information and facts. The Albert Academy University gives printed resources, book, fiction and non-fiction as nicely as pamphlets, newspapers, chart, photographs, monographs, manuals, handbooks, textbooks and other reference guides the library also presents non-books elements which incorporate audio and audio-visible components, slides, tape-slides, movie cassettes, and CD ROM’s. Despite the fact that these are not products in the common feeling, they nevertheless constitute sources for use by pupils and teachers. Use of digital sources assistance college libraries to present pupils and academics with a thought of a School Information Centre which is not ongoing to the university but is a url to an never-ending source of facts (Herring, 1988).
Albert Academy College Library Services
The goal of creating Albert Academy College Library is to give expert services for each pupils and instructors in a bid to satisfy a person of its main purposes, which is to aid curriculum targets by offering expert services that are indispensably connected to the fulfillment of this function.
One of the principal products and services of the Albert Academy University library is to act as back again-up to the below resourced school programme. Even innovative nations around the world are unable to effortlessly stock supplies ranging from five thousand (5,000) to twenty thousand (20,000) in a little room to offer support to faculty programmes. Consequently, they see the require for central stock of components which can be borrowed for differing lengths of time (lending provider) and also for studying and consultation providers. This is finished in purchase to augment the faculty curriculum at the Albert Academy which is inclusive of the Primary Sciences and Engineering, Social Sciences, Humanities and the Wonderful Arts.
Albert Academy College library also gives inter-library financial loan expert services requests. This is significantly worthwhile to senior pupils learning subjects across subjects made available in depth. Pupils who can not manage to buy or obtain this kind of highly-priced supplies benefit from this style of library provider. Via inter-library financial loan products and services, products are sourced from other educational facilities libraries for the reward of each pupils and instructors.
A reference services is also presented at Albert Academy School library. The School Librarians commit a sizeable proportion of their time supplying what in other libraries phrase would be termed as reference assistance. In furnishing a reference services, faculty Librarians complete a very similar job to that of other librarians. In a reference job interview in faculty, just about every pupil is handled as important as the other and supplied the Librarian’s full consideration. This is obtained by personalized support offered to the pupils and lecturers in obtaining specific information and facts whether direct or oblique. Some of the reference supplies at the Albert Academy College Library are dictionaries, encyclopedias, directories, yearbooks, biographies newspapers, maps and charts, and the academic and administrative calendar of events or the operation of the college.
A person of the most valuable products and services furnished by Albert Academy Faculty library is that of data provision. The Albert Academy School library retains the instructors and pupils educated about new instructional sources and growth in the fields of fascination to them by exhibiting the jackets of guides that just arrived. The Albert Academy College library makes use of Existing Recognition Solutions (CAS) to achieve this target. This is completed by figuring out the details desires of equally academics and pupils and assembly these demands. Connected to the CAS is the Selective Dissemination of Information and facts (SDI) and this is much more individual with instructors. This ranges from keeping particular person lecturers knowledgeable about new assets in the library or about recently released products, to alerting lecturers to conferences and program demands or celebration joined to their curricular interest.
Difficulties of Library Provision and Services at the Albert Academy College Library
No make any difference what an organisation has to count as results, is sure to face sure complications that stand in advance of it as troubles to its achievement. School Libraries in Sierra Leone, especially Albert Academy School Library are not without the need of challenges.
To start with the library and its sources have been overlooked by the pupils and lecturers. Inspite of their all-significant mother nature of assistance provision in support to them they do not see it as a useful part of their things to do. This is for the reason that most lecturers and pupils do not get enough offer of textbooks and other products right linked to the curriculum programme and most teachers get ready pamphlets for sale to pupils from which there teaching is based. This has induced most of the pupils to intensely count on those resources rather of the library resources.
The School Library has a staffing challenge. For example the Albert Academy University Library has no specialist library staff to manage an information and facts support for above two thousand pupils and teachers.
In addition, the library has a challenge with space. The house presented for the library from inception is now not plenty of for the college. The university population in terms of lecturers and pupils has developed comparatively higher to over two thousand (2000) pupils and employees as in contrast to the area furnished for a tiny about 5 hundred (500) pupils and personnel about 40 years in the past. It has grow to be complicated to entry the library and its methods.
In addition, there is a funding challenge. The Albert Academy Faculty Library is confronted with the difficultly of securing resources from the universities authorities for an helpful assortment development. The library relies upon heavily on donations and items to stock its assortment and most of these components offered in this guise are not reflective of the courses offered in the faculty curriculum. Often, the university administration has to spread meager fiscal methods across a large spectrum of university requirements.
The establishment of the laptop laboratory with slight net facilities impartial of the college library has also made a problem for the Albert Academy School Library. The lecturers and pupils would want to pay a visit to the Computer centre for World-wide-web companies considerably extra that going to the library. The separation of the Net facilities from the library expert services has posed a major danger to the library provision and products and services.
Also, it is really tested that the Albert Academy Faculty Library lacks the capability to supply for the visually impaired or handicapped. The absence of faculty library components in the Braille format helps prevent blind and the partly sighted pupils to make the most of the out there library means in their educational institutions libraries.
Remaining, the challenge of preservation of library supplies is not a prevalent follow for the Albert Academy Faculty. This preservation is intended to guarantee that the components previous extended mainly because of their frequent use. It has turn out to be tricky to accessibility cash to maintain materials that are under risk of sporting out by way of continuous use.
Even with some gloomy predictions on the long term funding of training and doable limitations on the availability of means at the Albert Academy School Library, the potential of the university library looks assured. It can be argued that due to the fact of present academic and technological trends, there has by no means been a larger want for properly-resourced and skillfully staffed university library than it is now. The emphasis on the individual’s-the kid’s and the adult’s-means to uncover and use data properly is probably to continue in educational facilities, at get the job done and for leisure pursuits. A upcoming modern society dependent on digital info for its prosperity will need to have an details curriculum in its universities. Hence the availability of fantastic college library provision and services in the college curriculum can not be overemphasised (Kargbo, 2000).
