Assessment of Nigerian and Ugandan LIS Programs in Meeting the Demands of the Digital Age

Abstract

In today’s world where digital seems everything and everything seems digital, Library and Information Science as a discipline is continuously struggling to keep up with  diverse platforms through which it can satisfy the demands of the job market. This is especially so in Africa, as several Western institutions responsible for the training of librarians have done a considerable job in keeping up with the professional demands of the 21st century information environment.  To help the African LIS schools fulfill these demands, programs in LIS need to be constantly reviewed and revised to match up with the changes in the professional field. In this paper, we assessed the curricula of four LIS programs in East and West African countries in order to see if the curricula are in sync with the professional demands of librarians in the emerging digital-dominated information market. Our comparison was based on similar LIS program in the United States. Our final analysis shows that although all the four programs considered in Nigeria and Uganda are not adequately digitally inclusive, the two schools in Nigeria are even far from achieving digitally attractive LIS curricula. We thus recommend that both the two schools considered in Nigeria need to improve on the technology and online information management content of their curricula to reflect the 21st Century skill set demands for Librarians.