The Executive Vice Chairman of Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Professor Umar Danbatta, has called on private and public institutions to leverage Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to digitise their hard copy knowledge materials to make them more efficiently accessible to their workforce and external stakeholders.
This is even the NCC joined the rest of the world to celebrate the 2021 Library Day with the theme: “Welcome to Your Library.”
“ICT has helped in digitizing a large number of hitherto hard-copy books available to people, efforts must be made to access these materials as well as other hard-copy books to read. He said this has become central because the knowledge economy being driven by ICT requires reading and intellectual development for further advancement,” Danbatta said at the event held at the Commission’s Head Office in Abuja
While expressing dismay at the dwindling book-reading culture in Nigeria, he called for a positive change of attitude in the nations’ reading culture.
He underscored the importance of the library as a great resource with a variety of stocks reflecting the multi-functional structure of the Commission, the significance of which cannot be over-emphasized in the activities of the Commission as well as in a knowledge economy.
“As a regulator of a dynamic telecommunications industry, the Commission gives pride of place to library resources to ensure that it is abreast of current information, regulatory trends and international best practice in carrying out its mandate,” Danbatta added.
According to the EVC, this is the first ‘Library Day’ celebration holding since the establishment of the Commission’s library in 2003, noting that as an administrator and a Professor with many years of experience in the academia, he fully appreciates the role of a modern library in enabling research and new knowledge for organisational success.
He added that the NCC’s library was established to provide the necessary literature and knowledge materials to facilitate access to learning and dissemination of information.
The NCC library is 18 years now and it is a cutting-edge repository of knowledge and information with over 1,000 technical books in hard and soft copies aside other materials serving both internal and external stakeholders.
The Library Day celebration promotes the idea that libraries extend far beyond the four walls of a building and that everyone is welcome to use their services.
