Evaluation of Archives and Records Management Courses in Library and Information Science Schools in South-East, Nigeria

Abstract

The profession of Library and Information Science (LIS) started as an interdisciplinary field of study. Generally speaking, LIS is a profession that deals with the organization and the universe of knowledge, creation, access, collection, and preservation and or packaging of information either in physical and digital formats to serve purposes such teaching, research, and legal documentations. This paper therefore looks at an assessment of academic lecturers (librarians) in South-East Nigeria to establish from among them, their realignment into the area of Archives and Records Management research in these academic institutions. To establish the extent to which they acquire degrees in this area and offer first degree, masters and PhD degrees in Archives and Records Management. The paper also tries to find out how many of these departments are named after Archives and records Management and to establish if the naming affects the progress significantly. In doing this, academic librarians in Abia State University, Imo State University, Enugu State University, Ebonyi State University and Anambra State University were studied as case study sites. The paper finds out that none (except in one case) of these academic librarians have PhD in Records Management, none of the universities studied named the department Archives and Records Management, none offers first degree and direct masters or PhD as a degree. The null hypothesis tested was rejected to agree that the naming affects the progress of the departments in the recent times as students are no longer fashionable to LIS as it were. The paper recommends that LIS schools should change as the demand changes and that academic librarians should start acquiring degrees in this area of research to increase the potential of sustainability. The paper concludes that the profession is stagnant in South- East Nigeria as no significant changes has been adopted by the Schools studied in either research or nomenclature of academic research output in this area.