POSITION PAPER ON THE APPRAISAL AND PROMOTION OF THE LIBRARIANS IN THE UNIVERSITY SYSTEM

By Ven. Prof. Obiora Nwosu
Former Polytechnic Librarian, Federal Polytechnic Oko
Former Academy Librarian, Nigeria Police Academy Wudil Kano
Former University Librarian, Nnamdi Azikiwe University Awka
The Vice-Chancellor, Paul University Awka

Preamble:
This Position Paper is for and on behalf of the academic Librarians. Librarians in the university system are all academics by their professional operations and services in the university. Every university takes off with a standard university library to provide the most needed supporting knowledge based academic resources in the library. No academic programmes scale through accreditation without the excellent information resources collection development by the Librarians. The librarians do the academic programmes content analyses and make sure that core books, journal titles, and e-resources are permanently available and findable in all areas of all the academic programmes. The librarians do a deal of research to ensure that they follow the professional operations trend with the international best practices.
Without mincing words, Librarians are sound academics, with Researches on how best to provide factual information resources for all subject areas as their primary goal.

NUC’S STATUS PLACEMENT OF THE LIBRARIANS:
By the 1993 Circular, the NUC established the academic ACADEMIC STATUS of Librarians. Their promotion to be based on similar criteria as other academic staff, including publications, professional qualification in impact factor journals. The area of specialisation of the librarian is nothing but learning and research. The Academic Librarians evolve the Metadata, Keywords, Descriptors and Search Strategies for all fields of study. These are scholarly masterpiece research outputs by academic librarians.

THE PROMOTION OF ACADEMIC LIBRARIANS ARE BASED ON THE SAME GUIDELINES FOR ACADEMICS
Academics are promoted based on academic qualifications, scholarly publications, and academic leadership(Headship of Department or Faculty, successful completion of supervision of postgraduate students, editorship of journals in the field, external examiner or assessor, etc). Academic Librarians are teachers, mainly in the university library and also in the classroom as the NUC made it compulsory the teaching of the “Use of Library and Information Literacy,” to all 100 Level students by the librarians. Where there are the Departments of Library and Information Science in a university, academic Librarians are given at least library based practical oriented courses to handle and take the students to the university library for practicals.
Where there are no Departments of Library and Information Science, the reference services, and the practical oriented works to make all the library information resources are findable with ease and the finding ability support teachings to the students and other library users are equivalent to classroom lectures and tutorial participations. Every good lecturer should teach his course in collaboration and partnership with the academic Librarians so as to guide the students adequately to all available information resources to augment with what their lecturers gave them. The academic Librarians are therefore fully involved in the Classroom participation in all ramifications, thus, librarians are given DUAL APPOINTMENTS in universities that acknowledge their indispensable input to the university knowledge impartation.
Where there are the Departments of Library and Information Science, Librarian in the university library are given both the undergraduate and Postgraduate students to supervise. Supervision of postgraduate students is one of the stuff used to assess academics for promotion. To make up for this in the universities that do not have the Departments of Library and Information Science, the academic Librarians are appraised on their Empirical Research outputs that are PEER REVIEWED.

SUBMISSION OF THE ACADEMIC LIBRARIANS
(1) Having been accorded academic status by the NUC because of our professional training and operations in the university system, let the DUAL APPOINTMENTS of Librarians be recognised and implemented fully in the university.
(2) Let the NUC General Study Use of Library Course be fully recognised and accepted for Classroom Teaching and Practical for the academic Librarians. The classroom teaching and the practicals on the actual use of the library is more than enough for the academic Librarians. Where there is the Department of Library and Information Science, as in COOU, the academic Librarians will not be given more than one course to teach in the classroom in a semester so that their primary library operations and services that are purely academic in nature which not suffer. The academic Librarians will only put in one to two hours in a week in classroom teaching with greater time for the library operations and services. For instance the academic Librarians answer reference questions from students. When the students fail to ask the appropriate reference questions, the librarian helps them to formulate the reference questions and goes ahead to give the students the necessary information search strategies to maximise the reference information materials to answer or meet and satisfy their information need. The librarians ensure that the students are provided with the actual and factual information sources and resources that meet the information needs of students and other library users. All these library services are more than classroom lecturing and tutorial participations for the academic Librarians. The issue of paging the appraisal and promotion of academic Librarians to pure classroom participation, should therefore, not arise, from the afore stated. Academic Librarians do more with the additional personal information services to students in satisfying their information needs in the library, after teaching them the Use of Library Course in the classroom.
(3) Let the promotion of Librarians be based mainly on empirical research outputs which are peer reviewed. Let that be equivalent to Postgraduate students supervision where there are not enough Postgraduate students to supervise for the academic Librarians to be given some to supervise.
At Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, the academic Librarians are given Dual Appointments as follows:
1) Graduation Assistant/Graduate Assistant
2) Assistant Librarian/Assistant Lecturer
3) Librarian II/Lecturer II

4) Librarian I/Lecturer I
5) Senior Librarian/Senior Lecturer
6) Deputy University Librarian(Reader/Associate Professor)/ Reader(Associate Professor)
7) Professor(University Librarian)/ Professor.
NB: It is not a must that the appointed University Librarian has to be a Professor. A PhD holder in Library and Information Science can be appointed the University Librarian.
By appraisal all the Deputy University Librarians can be promoted to the rank of Professor based on their assessed Empirical Research outputs.