Libraries in the information age

Historically, libraries have served as places where books used for the documentation of knowledge were kept, but they are now portals to global information relevant in education, research, individual and national development (Omekwu & Ugwuanyi, 2009 in Okore, Ekere, and Eke,2009).

In this era of knowledge economy which has change the flow from people flows to knowledge flows, this concept has to change. According to Bill Gates and Collins Hemingway in 1999 in their book Business and the Speed of Thought, business and technology are integrated, and digital infrastructures and information networks can help someone get an edge on the competition. Gates asserts cyberspace and industry can no longer be separate entities, and that businesses must change to succeed in the Information Age.   

The library, as a conduit for information, serving a wide spectrum of information seekers, has a critical role to play in the facilitation of knowledge generation; hence, an unhindered access to knowledge is essential in a development process. It serves as a liberator from poverty and deprivation and as a springboard in the quest for innovation and change. Drake (1984) in Tise, Raju and Masango, (2008) says that access to information is a complex concept. Libraries have the mandate to drive access to information to alleviate poverty and deprivation due to paradoxical situation of a scarcity of information in an era of information explosion.

Libraries are not immune to the societal forces re-shaping other institutions brought about by technology and economics. A variety of forces, most especially economic changes and technological developments, have reshaped and redefined our notions of what constitute a library (Besser, 1998).  The electronic era of the 21st century has brought changes to the libraries’ working environment and acquisition of information resources that in turn presupposes the implementation of new strategies, change of structures and devising new acquisition principles. In the modern information society, where the use of electronic services and Web-based information sources constantly increases, libraries should be managed in a more democratic way, have more flexible communication system and work organisation, and their service development should be based on the quality and user-orientation of services. Besser, 1998 submits that technology has made libraries to become less important for the materials they collect or house, and more important for the kind of materials they can obtain in response to user requests. This movement from collecting material just in case someone will need it, to delivering material from elsewhere just in time to answer a user's needs, is a profound shift for the library as an institution.

Technology application to library services has brought a lot of changes to library operations there by making access to knowledge more convenient to user. Some of the fastest growing trends are noticed in the area of networking; file storage, graphic user interface. They have also been enabled by agreements on standards and protocols which permit the linking together of resources from disparate sources. From multiple locations: From anywhere, users can consult all library holdings from workstation throughout the systematic catalog, indexing, and abstracting services. Divorcing library services from a physical location provokes a profound difference in what a library service is. This can further be accelerated by the trend of ubiquitous computing which is taking even a faster pace than ever