Dr.(Mrs) Modupe Aboyade
It is an honour of great dimension to be part of this propitious development coming up at a time the Olusegun Oke Library is more concerned about rejuvenating, strengthening and revitalizing its services to meet the information needs and yearning of the teeming users. The reason is because, the world has moved from the information revolution age, to the knowledge economy era; suffice to say that, whatever one knows will be under one’s control, meaning that, an individual could remain a slave to what he does not know. Sequel to this, if one is not informed, one could be deformed.
In line with the foregoing, the academic library remains the best organ in the university that can provide information that is complementary to teaching, learning and research activities of the users. Equally, the library as the Commonwealth of learning, and the symbol of our universal information community has the primary role of providing information service to support the educational, recreational, cultural, economic and technological needs of the academic community. It is safe to say that, the more one accesses library resources the better the knowledge acquired. As an extension of the classroom, library space needs to embody new pedagogies, including collaborative and interactive learning modalities. Significantly, the library must serve as the principal learning centre on the campus of the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Ogbomoso, where one can truly experience and benefit from the centrality of an institution’s intellectual work/property and the unlimited avalanche of the world of information.
According to Gregorian (1998)
‘Libraries are not only repositories of past human endeavour, they are instruments of civilization. They provide tools for learning, a laboratory of human aspiration, a window to the future. They are a source of self-renewal, intellectual growth', and hope. In this land and everywhere on earth, they are a medium of progress, autonomy, empowerment, independence and self-determination. They have always provided, and would always provide, place and space for imaginative re-creation for imaginative rebirth.’
At this juncture, the business of libraries can now be understood as one key component of a rapidly evolving, almost wholly transformed environment in which information is proliferating at heretofore unimagined rates. It is therefore, an opportunity to be part of this ingenuity and inspiration coming from the LICT. The opportunity will help project the image of the Olusegun Oke Library and bring global visibility to LAUTECH in the Information and Technology world.