SAVE THE FUTURE; SECURE THE LIBRARIES

I still remember my first visit to the Accra Library like it was yesterday. Seeing all those books neatly packed on shelves and the intoxicating smell of ink on paper transported me to a world where my imagination could run wild. I was in heaven.

A few trips ensued after that initial visit but all that came to an end once my school vacation was over. After that, my mom would visit the place regularly to pick up the books I requested for. My junior high school lacked a library and only finally built one just when I was about to graduate. In subsequent years I frequented Accra library with my friends on Fridays or vacations and those were cherished moments.

In my senior high school the library was good enough as a place of study and nothing else. Most of the books were either outdated or in bad shape. I don’t quite remember seeing any periodicals aside from the Daily Graphic.

The library at the University of Ghana was however a different experience. The Balme library lived up to my expectation though I cannot say so for all the departmental libraries on campus. Nonetheless, throughout my four years in school I only started appreciating the place more when it was time to write my Long Essay in final year.

Fast forward to today and the state of the Accra library makes me shudder as it lacks the amenities one would expect in a modern library. And if this is the state of our national library then I do not even want to imagine what the other smaller public libraries would look like.

In our part of the world, the decline in library patronage should be of concern to us. Some argue that people have less incentive to use libraries as information is easily accessible online. That should not be the case though as the fountain of knowledge and information that can be found in well stocked libraries can never be replaced by the internet. In any event, technological devices should rather be used to enhance our libraries – an example is digitizing academic books, journals and articles out of print and making them easily accessible online.

For our upcoming generation the benefits of inculcating the habit of reading can never be over emphasized. People should not be denied the pleasures of reading due to financial reasons and that is when a library comes in handy. Besides, if we really want to tackle illiteracy rates then we need to sit up as a nation to make the books or resources readily available. We could do so by investing more in mobile libraries for remote communities whereas existing libraries must be refurbished and stocked with more current books.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson succinctly puts it, “if we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads”.