Librarians call for stakeholders’ collaboration on reading culture revival

The national chairman of Nigeria Library Association (NLA) Mr Dominic Omokaro, has called on stakeholders to liaise with the association to revive and promote the reading culture in the country.

Omokaro, who observed that people are shifting focus from reading, stated this during the 61st national conference and annual general meeting of the association in Akure, Ondo State.

He called for urgent intervention in this regard from the private and public sectors as well as the nation’s institutions of higher learning.

According to him, a vibrant reading culture is very key to every individual’s development and the society at large.

The association also lamented that the culture of reading and using the library had been abandoned but expressed the association’s readiness to partner with governments and other stakeholders to bring back the culture for the development of the country.

Omokaro, who disclosed that the association had been doing all it could to encourage reading, said: “The day you stop reading, you start dying. A nation that is not reading is a nation that has set itself in a reverse gear.”

The library remains the people’s university and we want to encourage the people to continue to read. We will also do everything within our best to reach out to government and development agencies. For any nation to be actively involved in reading, the government must be fully involved,” he added.

Speaking on the theme of the conference, ‘Promoting Library Collaboration in a Changing World,’ the NLA chairman said that the conference would afford members and stakeholders to brainstorm on ways to revive reading culture.

He said apart from this, the annual event which brought together members of the association, would also create an avenue to discuss issues that would translate into the growth of the profession in Nigeria and Africa in general.

Declaring the conference open, the acting Governor of Ondo State, Mr Lucky Aiyedatiwa, said “without libraries, a nation would have no history and the future of such a nation is in jeopardy.”

noted that whatever the cost of building libraries is could not be compared to the aftermath of ignorance of a nation.

“We have a state-owned library that is duly funded and managed by the state government, apart from the existence of libraries in many of our institutions of learning,” he said.