Revamp all libraries now!
Last Wednesday, Huawei Technologies Ghana S.A. Limited, a global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, handed over a refurbished lending and reference library and a fully equipped computer laboratory to the Accra Central Library.
Advertisement
The decision of the company to undertake the rehabilitation of the library, which also houses the headquarters of the Ghana Library Authority (GLA), follows a Daily Graphic report on the sorrowful state of libraries in the country.
While commending Huawei Technologies for that exemplary move, the sorry state of libraries in the country is a matter of national concern that must be addressed with all the seriousness it deserves.
In the past, libraries played a key role in the educational set up of the country, offering the opportunity to students at every level of academic life to have access to books that one could not easily afford on the market.
In some cases, one could access resources from libraries that one would not have found elsewhere in the public domain.
Indeed, children at the primary level visited the libraries and borrowed story books, took them home, read and returned them.
Sometimes, schools made visits to public libraries mandatory and students were expected to periodically present reports on the books they had read and the new vocabulary they had acquired.
That practice, without doubt, led to the enrichment of the language ability of students and that translated into the training of a high calibre of human resource at all levels of the educational ladder.
Regrettably, in an era of the proliferation of ICT, the importance and patronage of public libraries have been consigned to the dustbin of history.
This is because of the wide array of resources available on the Internet, as well as other social media tools that have enhanced the quality of information access.
The Daily Graphic, however, is of the view that the multiplier effect of information access is enhanced when modern ICT tools are used in tandem with the library system.
It is important to note that not every book can be found on the Internet and, therefore, accessing the library will provide additional resource to back up what one gets from online sources.
Today, some of the libraries that helped produce the cream of Ghanaian academia and others from other African countries such as the Balme at Legon, the George Padmore, the British Council and otherss are only pale shadows of themselves.
It is, therefore, little wonder that the standard of education, especially in the English language, has fallen.
The place of reading has been taken over by social media applications such as whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Telegram, Viber, Tango, among a host of other applications.
These media have their own variations of English language usage that do not conform to the academic style and the addictive usage of them by our students leads to a situation where that informal language is applied to proper academic work.
Although attempts are being made on different fronts to arrest the falling standards, those efforts will not be comprehensive unless practical steps are taken to revive our libraries and restore their mandatory patronage by our pupils right from the basic level.