Acting head, Department of School Library and Media Technology, University of Ibadan, Oyo State, Dr Alice Adejoke Bamigbola, has advocated an eight-point agenda to accelerate digital transformation of academic knowledge.
The don made this known during the 20th Faculty of Education lecture tagged: ‘From Shelves to Servers: Digital Libraries and the Future of Academic Knowledge in Nigeria’, held at the Large Lecture Theatre of the Faculty, recently.
In the lecture, Bamigbola recommended expanding broadband access and digital literacy; stronger national standards for institutional repositories and open access; increasing government funding for research and digital knowledge infrastructure; investing in reliable electricity and internet connectivity; and secure servers.
The don also recommended institutionalising mandatory deposition of scholarly works; repositioning academic libraries as digital knowledge hubs; strengthening librarians’ capacity as digital architects; and rewarding open and responsible scholarship.
While stressing that transformation requires deliberate collaboration among government, universities, libraries, researchers, technology providers, and other relevant stakeholders, she said that physical libraries remain indispensable for heritage, preservation, and cultural memory.
She, however, said that digital platforms are critical for extending the reach and impact of Nigerian scholarship and called for the development of a national knowledge ecosystem in which Nigerian research is not only produced and preserved, but also visible, searchable, accessible, citable, reusable, and globally connected.
The don called for urgent and strategic transformation of the nation’s academic libraries from traditional repositories of printed materials into dynamic digital knowledge hubs capable of making Nigerian scholarship accessible, discoverable, and globally impactful.
While stressing the growing role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in academic knowledge management and dissemination, she said AI is already transforming the organisation and retrieval of knowledge through automated indexing, metadata generation, classification, and intelligent tagging.
The don, however, said that the future survival, relevance, and global impact of Nigerian scholarship increasingly depend on the nation’s ability to move beyond the physical storage of knowledge to robust digital infrastructure.