Producing a New Brand of Library Educators through Collaborative Teaching: a Position from Developing Country

Abstract

Library professionals consists mainly of two major groups- the educators and the practitioners. In some cases the educators are more grounded in theory than practice while the reverse is the case for practitioners. By extension, the transformation engendered by Information and communication technology for library operations and services impacted heavily on the practitioners and spurred them to embrace as well as overcome the challenges posed by ICT. The result is that many library practitioners developed competencies needed not only for traditional library services but for hybrid and later electronic libraries. Hence a new brand of professionals labelled variously as Systems librarian, Automation librarian, ICT librarian, digital librarian etc emerged. Though there was the need for library educators to develop along the line of new competencies, the effort and result of the effort became more glaring and rewarding with library practitioners. By way of borrowing from the already acquired competencies, some library schools are utilizing the competencies of the rebranded practitioners to strengthen their curriculum. By so doing, the former are producing new crop of library educators through this collaborative effort. The paper was designed to unveil the factors that hinder / enhance the development of new competencies by library educators / practitioners in developing countries and how library schools are tapping from the competencies of library practitioners as well as other experts in related fields to produce a new brand of library educators . Recommendations are made on how to ensure continuing evolution of library educator.