RE-POSITIONING FACULTY LIBRARIES USING TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATIONS: A PANACEA FOR INFORMATION SERVICE DELIVERY IN BENUE STATE ACADEMIC LIBRARIES DURING POST COVID-19 ERA

Abstract

The wake of COVID-19 pandemic has thrown in a revolution of technological resources and its usefulness in dissemination of information services in Benue State Academic libraries. It became paramount to strategies an effective use of evolving technological resources. Post COVID-19 pandemic era requires emphatic sensitization and implementation of the government protocol to avoid reinfection of the community within the university environment which is usually populated. An observational factor of the non-pharmaceutical preventive measures against COVID19 (which is regarded as the new normal within the faculty libraries requires) requires stringent enforcement by a supervisory team due to the high rate of deviance. This paper seeks to address the strategies on the re-positioning of faculty libraries to effectively use trending technologies to disseminate information needs of the teeming students in their various departmental academic environments. There are enlisted measures on the possibility to divert pressures from the Main Library to the faculty libraries with the objectives of providing intellectual library services in a controlled population to avert breaching laid down government protocols within the university community. The technological nexus in this perspective were: KOHA, RemoteXs, RFID and Groupware Technology etc. The challenges identified were such as; infrastructural inadequacies, funding, adaptability of the new normal and enforcement of the preventive protocols. The study however recommends the following; Inaugurate COVID-19 Protocol Committee, Budgeting and financing appropriately, Up-skilling and Retooling, Activation of Institutional Repositories and Positivism in Attitudinal change to use of technology for effective information service deliveries in faculty libraries.