Academic Library Leadership in Nigeria and ICT Adoption

Abstract

Leadership is vital to the accomplishment of librarianship in the modern era. This paper investigated academic library leadership in Nigeria and ICT adoption. A descriptive research design was used for the study. The Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) was used for data collection. The population of the study was 402 librarians in academic libraries in South-west, Nigeria. It was found that library leadership plays a significant role in ICT adoption in academic libraries in Nigeria. The study found that though both transformational and transactional leadership styles are good in an academic library setting, the respondents rated their leaders as more transformational than transactional. The extent of the adoption of ICT in performing library operations is high. The libraries benefited enormously from the adoption of ICT, even though the libraries face a lot of challenges in the adoption of ICT. It was recommended that Library leaders should imbibe transformational leadership practices in the management of their libraries as it offers effective leadership and is acceptable to the subordinates. The academic libraries should also make full-scale adoption of ICT in performing their operations due to the numerous improvements ICT brings to job performance and service delivery