Divisions

Serials Division of the Nnamdi Azikiwe Library

The Serials Division is the research resort for the staff and students of the University. There are varieties of information and research materials in stock to meet the needs of the clientele in all fields that the University offers courses in, and in every manner of research. The materials include: periodicals; journals of learned societies; transactions of institutions and societies; proceedings of meetings; house journals; newspapers; magazines; indexing and abstracting journals; annual reports; yearbook; newsletters and electronic journals. The Division runs an open access to all academic staff, postgraduate students of the University and accredited external users. These users are at liberty to interact with all materials in stock. It is on the other hand closed access to undergraduates who need to be guided to access the materials they need for their write-ups, term papers, seminars, long essays, projects. etc.

Online Resources Available to Users

The Nnamdi Azikiwe Library subscribes to the following Databases through which it can access electronic journals via the web. They include:

• OARE (Online Access to Research in the Environment)
• EBSCOHOST (Paid for by the NUC)
• AGORA (Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture)
• JSTOR (Journal Storage)
• HINARI (Health Internetwork Access to Research)

Each of these databases holds thousands of academic journals online with millions of articles accessible to the users, free of charge.

Serial Holdings

There are a total of 5,438 titles of journals available in Serials Division. These constitute a total of 67,260 bound volumes and 32,500 unbound volumes, giving a sum of 99,760 volumes.

Public Services Division

Public Services Division is the library’s image maker, the hub on which all library services revolve, which main duty is to enhance access to information in both print and non-print media. Public Services Division supports the missions of the Library and the University by assisting users in finding and facilitating access to information, and teaching concepts and skills necessary for current research and lifelong learning. Staffs in public services are responsible for all library functions that involve direct contact with library users at the Nnamdi Azikiwe Library.

The division is made up of the Reference Section and Circulation Section.

• Reference Section
  Reference Services is generally regarded as the handmaid of librarianship. This is because the Reference Section endeavours to provide the information the user needs as distinct from what he wants. The core materials in this vital section include encyclopaedias, directories, indexes, abstracts maps, newspaper and magazine, guide books, and gazettes. The collection in this Section has grown over the years 2004 – 2010: newspapers (96,861) and other reference sources (29,846).

Over the years (under review) the services of the Circulation Section has been very impressive. It registered 58,152 users; loaned out 66,380 books and recorded over 374,800 monthly use of the library as cumulated from daily use statistics.

Special Collections Division

The Special Collections Division acquires, organizes, preserves, and provides resources to support teaching, learning and research in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Because of the currency and specialized nature of its resources, the Special Collections Division is often regarded as the Research Library of the University.

The Special Collection Division has the following Sections:

• The United Nations Depository Library;
• Government Documents and Archives; and
• Africana.

Technical Services Division

The Division consists of cataloguing and bindery. It is responsible for processing library materials and organizing them for easy and convenient use. The Division maintains the Library’s manual catalogue. Working collectively with other library units, the Division defines policies and practices that assure responsive and timely access to our collections of print and digital materials. The Division is the process of developing an online library catalogue of UNN libraries. A new growth area, into which the Division is venturing, is metadata production services which will increase the value of digital collections inside and outside the library, by making these collections easier to find, use and share. The Division has an excellent Bindery Services Unit which binds books, journals, and theses. It also undertakes lamination. The Division now applies online cataloguing in bibliographic control. It is the library’s power house for knowledge segmentation, descriptions and retrieval tools development.

Collection Development Division

One of the primary goals of the Nnamdi Azikiwe Library is to build collections that meet the current and future teaching, learning and research needs of all of the University’s programmes and also contribute to the generation, dissemination, and preservation of knowledge. The University of Nigeria library system divides the responsibility for building its collections among librarians, teaching staff and students. Each of these persons is responsible for selecting library resources. It is the function of the librarians, or selectors, to determine which books, periodicals, video and sound recordings, electronic resources, and other information sources should be acquired or made available by the library.

The general criteria used by selectors for the acquisition of information resources in the University of Nigeria Libraries are listed below in order of priority:

• Curriculum support;
• Standard source availability (i.e., core materials on subjects studied at the University);
• Faculty research support;
• Graduate student research support;
• Subject representation (i.e., materials that represent major trends in scholarship);
• Collection continuity (i.e., maintenance of existing collections);
• Inter-institutional agreements (i.e., agreements with other academic libraries to take responsibility for collecting materials for particular subject areas);

In selecting and making available information resources, the Libraries will comply with the copyright laws and with the provisions of any licenses that are signed on behalf of the University.