📍 *Prof L.O. Aina submission on the B.Ed- LIS Curriculum

📍 *Prof L.O. Aina submission on the B.Ed- LIS Curriculum*

I am surprised that NUC still believes that LIS curriculum should be affiliated to Education curriculum. This is because as the President of NLA in 2012, during the NLA 50th Anniversary Conference, I asked some senior LIS professors to visit the then Executive Secretary of NUC, Professor Julius Okojie. The mission of the visit was to convince the ES to disaffiliate LIS curriculum from Education in all ramifications and remove LIS schools from the Faculty of Education in Nigerian universities. The ES then, argued that there was nothing wrong in locating LIS schools in the Faculty of Education, after all, the first library school in Nigeria, the Institute of Librarianship, University College Ibadan was located in the Faculty of Education. He was educated that the  location of the Institute of Librarianship, University College Ibadan at the Faculty of Education,  was circumstances of birth.

Arising from the Unesco Seminar on Public Libraries, held in Ibadan, in 1954, a library school was proposed for West Africa to be located at the University College Ibadan. The library school took off from the University Library in 1959. *The early sets of graduates of the programme were produced from the University Library building. However, in 1962, a new building of the Faculty of Education was constructed, and the Institute of Librarianship moved to the Faculty of Education for accommodation purposes only, thus the library school was accommodated at the new building of the Faculty of Education. The affiliation was just physical and not curricular*. Education courses were never infused into the LIS programme. I thought with this convincing explanation to the then ES, affiliation of LIS with Education was dead.

During my tenure as the National Libraian,  I hosted a meeting of the major stakeholders of our profession, under the chairmanship of the then President of NLA,  Dr Umunna Opara. The objective of the meeting was to educate NUC on the need to broaden LIS schools into Faculty status.  We suggested many names for the proposed faculty and took our proposal to NUC. In our submission,  we indicated that we did not want LIS programme to be affiliated with the Faculty of Education in any Nigerian university. I am therefore surprised that a new nomenclature is being proposed for LIS programme, ostensibly by a committee of eight, of which seven members are not librarians, and when the only librarian in the committee raised objections, the Committee still insisted on using the nomenclature B.Ed Library and Information Science. I am not aware of any country anywhere in the world, where the basic LIS degree is B.Ed Library and Information Science. LIS programmes are being upgraded into Faculty status all over the world, we are still battling with nomenclature through no fault ours. I can't understand why meddlesome interlopers will decide our fate.

*To fulfil all righteousness, the current President of NLA should convene a meeting of senior academics and other stakeholders to draft protest letters to NUC and the Ministry of Education, which will be circulated on all NLA platforms for our input. The protest letter to the NUC must be resolved within six weeks of dispatching the letter, if not, then the second letter to the Honourable Minister of Education should be forwarded to him, if the issue is still not resolved, then we should go to Court.*

*I must emphasise that I do not believe anything will come out of the protest letters, going to Court is the ultimate. Of course, going to Court has financial implications. I am suggesting that a lawyer's fund should be launched by the NLA. All members of the profession must contribute generously to the Fund. We should use the money generated to pay the professional fees of the lawyer we engage.*
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*Prof. L. O. Aina*