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Written by Azeez Elijah Olawale
elijah.azeez@nln.gov.ng
Picture the word "library" in your mind right now. Chances are, you saw rows of quiet shelves, an old woman whispering "shh," and a building people visit only when they need to read for an exam. That picture is not wrong, but it is decades out of date, and it is costing Nigeria and the rest of the world far more than anyone realizes. The truth is that libraries have changed shape, changed purpose, and changed almost everything about how they serve society, while the public conversation about them has stayed frozen in 1985. This gap between what a library actually is today and what people still believe it to be explains why funding dries up, why young people avoid the profession, and why governments treat libraries as a luxury instead of a necessity.
This is not a nostalgic piece about how libraries used to matter and should be missed. It is the opposite. It argues that libraries matter more right now, in an age of misinformation, data overload, and digital exclusion, than they did when the only thing they offered was a shelf of novels. By the end of this piece, you will understand why the profession behind libraries is properly called library and information science, not library science alone, and why that distinction is not academic nitpicking but a matter of national development. You will also see, with real numbers, what it costs a country to keep treating its libraries as storage rooms instead of engines of growth.
The Library You Think You Know Does Not Exist Anymore
Ask ten people what a library does and most will describe a place for borrowing books, finding a quiet corner to study, or occasionally printing a document. None of these answers are false, but together they describe maybe a third of what a modern library and information center actually does. A library today manages digital archives, runs data and research support services, teaches information literacy to people who cannot tell a credible news source from a fabricated one, preserves a nation's cultural memory in formats that will survive long after paper has crumbled, and increasingly acts as a public technology hub for people who have no other way to access the internet, a printer, or a trained guide through government paperwork.
The National Library of Nigeria itself shows this shift clearly. Its Strategic Plan for 2025 to 2030, published through the library's own institutional repository, lays out goals built around diversified funding sources, revenue from digital subscription and other paid services, active public-private partnerships, and a modern Library Management System designed to operate in the internet era, none of which match the dusty image most Nigerians still carry around. The plan also commits the institution to training its staff regularly to keep pace with fast-moving technology in the information sector, an acknowledgment that the profession cannot stand still while the tools around it keep changing. None of this is the work of a quiet reading room. This is the work of an institution trying to rebuild itself into a digital knowledge hub for an entire nation, and almost nobody outside the profession knows that effort is even underway.
Why "Library Science" Is the Wrong Name for This Work
Here is where the language problem starts doing real damage. Most people, when they hear "library science," imagine a course that teaches you how to arrange books by author surname and stamp due dates on the inside cover. That description might have made sense seventy years ago, but it has almost nothing to do with what the discipline trains people to do today, and using the outdated name keeps shrinking how the public, employers, and government understand the profession's actual value. The correct and complete name is library and information science, commonly shortened to LIS, and the difference between the two terms is not cosmetic.
Library and information science is described by scholars as an interdisciplinary field that studies how recorded information of every kind gets created, organized, stored, protected, communicated, and used by people. It centers on documentation that records our stories, memory, history, and knowledge, with professionals who serve as custodians of printed materials, records, photographs, audiovisual materials, and ephemera in both analog and digital form. That single description already covers far more ground than "arranging books," because it includes data management, digital preservation, archival science, records management, and information policy, all sitting under one professional roof. Library science on its own, by contrast, traditionally narrows in on the practical running of a physical library, things like cataloging materials, organizing collections, and helping patrons find what they need in a building.
The reason this distinction matters so much in practice comes down to skills and career paths. Library science professionals overwhelmingly work in physical institutional settings such as public libraries, academic libraries, and special libraries housed within hospitals, law firms, museums, government agencies, and corporations, with day-to-day work shaped by patron needs, collection priorities, and public service goals. Information science, the other half of the LIS field, pulls in a different but connected set of skills entirely. A certificate or degree leaning into information science qualifies a graduate to work in information centers built around technology, with skills in networking, programming, writing code, and management information systems, essentially making the profession lean toward information and communication technology applied to knowledge management. Put these two halves together, as the full name "library and information science" does, and you get a profession capable of running a small community reading room and a national digital repository with equal competence, often within the same career.
Calling someone trained in this field a "library scientist" instead of a library and information science professional is a bit like calling a software engineer a "typist" because both work with a keyboard. The smaller word survives out of habit, not accuracy, and every time it gets used in a job advertisement, a government policy document, or a university prospectus, it quietly tells the public that this work is simpler and less valuable than it actually is. Nigerian library schools, professional bodies, and government agencies have a real opportunity here, because fixing the name on paper, in curricula, in job titles, and in public communication is one of the cheapest and fastest ways to start repairing how the entire profession gets perceived and funded.
What a Country Loses When It Treats Libraries as an Afterthought
Numbers tell this story more honestly than opinions can, and Nigeria's own recent history with its National Library offers a sobering case study. The National Library headquarters in Abuja was first conceived back in 1981 as a defining structure for the nation's capital, yet the construction contract was only awarded in 2006, twenty-five years later. As of 2023, only forty-four percent of the physical building work had been completed, with estimates to finish the project ranging from roughly forty-nine point six billion naira to over one hundred and twenty billion naira, a figure fourteen times higher than the original eight point six billion naira estimate. Forty-four years after it was first imagined, the country meant to house Africa's most populous nation's central knowledge repository still operates out of rented apartments rather than a purpose-built home, a detail that says more about national priorities than any speech ever could.
It took a public birthday fundraiser by the the first lady and the wife of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in 2025 to finally unlock momentum on this stalled national project, raising attention and funds in a matter of weeks for something that successive governments had left untouched for decades. Meanwhile, the government and wealthy individuals in the country had already found the resources to complete other prestige buildings nearby, including a National Mosque and a National Ecumenical Centre, both of which now physically flank the unfinished library site as a visible reminder of where funding priorities actually sat. This is not a story about religion or politics competing with literacy; it is a story about what gets built first when a country decides what truly counts as essential infrastructure, and a library, despite housing the nation's intellectual memory, did not make that list for almost half a century.
Step back from the National Library specifically and look at Nigeria's wider education and innovation numbers, and the connection between weak library infrastructure and national underperformance becomes harder to ignore. Nigeria ranked one hundred and thirteenth out of one hundred and thirty-three countries in the World Intellectual Property Organization's global innovation rankings, and no Nigerian university has appeared in the Times Higher Education top one thousand list for years. Even more troubling, the country recorded eighteen point three million out-of-school children as of 2024 according to UNICEF data, the highest number of any country in the world, a crisis tied partly to incoherent implementation of programs like the Universal Basic Education Scheme. None of these outcomes were caused by libraries alone, but a nation that consistently under-resources the institutions built specifically to spread literacy, support research, and preserve knowledge should not be surprised when its broader literacy and innovation numbers struggle to improve.
Libraries Are Quietly Becoming the Last Free Public Space Left
Strip away the funding politics for a moment and consider what a library actually offers a community that almost nothing else does anymore: a space you can enter without spending money, sit in for hours without anyone asking you to buy something, and use to access the internet, a printer, government forms, research databases, or simply silence, all completely free at the point of use. As more public space gets converted into shopping centers, paid co-working spaces, or members-only clubs, the library has quietly become one of the last remaining places where a student, a job seeker, an elderly retiree, and a small business owner researching a loan application can all sit under the same roof with equal access to the same resources, regardless of what is in their pocket.
This matters enormously in a country like Nigeria, where digital access remains deeply unequal across regions and income levels. A library branch with reliable internet access and a trained information professional on hand becomes, for many users, the only realistic bridge between themselves and the digital economy, government services, online education platforms, and global research databases that increasingly determine who gets ahead and who gets left behind. The National Library of Nigeria currently operates thirty-three branches and has stated an ambition to expand into all thirty-six state capitals as originally envisioned by the 1970 library decree, a goal that remains unmet largely because of the same chronic underfunding documented throughout this piece. Every state capital without a fully functioning branch is effectively a community cut off from this free bridge to opportunity, left instead to rely entirely on whatever private resources individual families can afford.
The People Behind the Profession Deserve Better Than Misunderstanding
Behind every functioning library sits a trained professional whose work goes almost entirely unseen by the public they serve, and this invisibility is itself part of the problem this article is trying to solve. A skilled librarian or information professional does far more than check books in and out; they design classification systems that make millions of items findable in seconds, build and maintain digital repositories that will outlive the original hardware they were created on, teach entire communities how to evaluate information for accuracy in an age thick with deliberate misinformation, and increasingly serve as the human bridge between ordinary citizens and complex digital systems they were never taught to navigate.
The National Librarian of Nigeria, Professor Chinwe Veronica Anunobi, has used her position to push exactly this message, urging librarians across the country to project their profession wherever they find themselves and stating publicly that libraries remain central to education in Nigeria. She has also called for the introduction of makerspaces within school libraries, a forward-looking idea that would transform school libraries from passive reading rooms into hands-on creative and technical learning spaces, further proof that the leadership inside the profession already understands where libraries need to go even as public perception lags years behind. Professor Anunobi's own career path, having served as University Librarian at the Federal University of Technology, Owerri before rising to lead the National Library, and now holding a position on the Conference of Directors of National Libraries internationally, reflects exactly the breadth of skill that library and information science training is meant to produce.
This is the part of the conversation that affects you directly, no matter your profession, because every researcher, journalist, student, business owner, and policymaker in Nigeria relies on the work of library and information science professionals whether they realize it or not. When you search for a verified statistic, trace the history of a community, locate an old newspaper archive, access a government budget line, or simply find a quiet, free space to think and work, you are relying on infrastructure that someone trained in this field built and continues to maintain. Treating that work as a lesser, dying profession does not just insult the people doing it; it actively discourages talented young Nigerians from entering a field the country desperately needs more skilled people in, creating a shortage that will only deepen the very problems this article has laid out.
What Real Investment in Libraries Would Actually Look Like
None of this means throwing money at libraries blindly will solve everything. Real investment looks different from simply allocating a larger number on a budget sheet. It looks like completing infrastructure projects within reasonable timeframes instead of letting them stall for over four decades, the way the National Library headquarters did. It looks like expanding branch networks into every state capital as originally promised, so that access to free information and digital connectivity is not determined by which city a Nigerian happens to be born in. It looks like properly funding staff training so that library and information science professionals can keep pace with fast-moving technology instead of falling behind it.
It also looks like the National Assembly following through on proposals like the Library Trust Fund, an idea the National Library has publicly expressed support for during legislative hearings, which would create a dedicated, diversified funding stream less dependent on the unpredictable yearly federal budget cycle that has left the institution underfunded for generations. Diversified funding, including the kind of public-private partnerships the National Library's 2025 to 2030 strategic plan explicitly names as a goal, matters because it spreads financial responsibility across government, the private sector, and philanthropic organizations rather than leaving the entire burden on a federal budget line that competes every year against roads, healthcare, and security spending.
Government is not the only actor with a role to play here, and this is the part everyday readers can act on immediately rather than waiting on policy change. Visiting your local library branch, even if you do not need to borrow a book, signals demand that funding bodies eventually notice. Supporting book donation drives for schools without functioning libraries, the kind of grassroots effort referenced earlier in this piece, fills gaps that government funding has not yet reached. Correcting friends, employers, and even journalists when they describe the profession as simply "library science" rather than library and information science is a small act that, multiplied across thousands of conversations, gradually shifts how an entire field gets perceived and consequently funded.
The Idea That Needs to Die Is the One in Your Head, Not the Library Itself
Libraries are not disappearing because the world stopped needing organized knowledge, free public space, or trained guides through an increasingly complicated information landscape. If anything, every one of those needs has grown sharper as misinformation spreads faster, digital inequality widens, and the sheer volume of available information has become impossible for any individual to sort through alone without help. What has actually been dying, quietly and largely unnoticed, is the outdated picture so many people still carry of what a library is for and who works inside one.
Nigeria's own National Library tells this story in miniature: a forty-four-year wait for a headquarters building, a public birthday fundraiser needed to finally move construction forward, thirty-three branches doing the work of what should eventually be thirty-six, and a leadership team that understands the field's modern scope even while public funding and public perception both lag years behind. Closing that gap does not require reinventing the institution. It requires the public, employers, and government finally seeing libraries and the library and information science professionals who run them as what they already are: essential infrastructure for a literate, informed, and globally competitive Nigeria, not a quiet room people stopped needing. The library was never the problem. The outdated idea of it was, and that idea is long overdue for retirement.