Donors flock to restock UniJos library after fire incident

Since the October 8, 2016 fire incident at the library complex, Naraguta campus of the University of Jos, the university’s richest reservoirs of knowledge hasn’t regained its past glory.  The area that was once known to be full of life with a lot of staff and student activities now seemed abandoned. The fire that engulfed […]

Since the October 8, 2016 fire incident at the library complex, Naraguta campus of the University of Jos, the university’s richest reservoirs of knowledge hasn’t regained its past glory.  The area that was once known to be full of life with a lot of staff and student activities now seemed abandoned.

The fire that engulfed the entire library as well as materials in the departments of sociology, psychology, political science, economics, accounting and business administration in the faculties of social and management sciences had also affected offices at the faculties of arts.

Examination scripts of hundreds of undergraduates that were not marked had been destroyed. Many had feared that the Library complex may have suffered too much a damage to still be useful but the interim report for the structural integrity test of the building had shown that it can still be occupied. The Vice Chancellor, Prof. Sebastian Seddi Maimako, said the university had been advised against co-habiting the library and other offices on the same floor until massive repairs are done to resuscitate it.

The library complex did not only house offices and intellectual materials but also had various sizes of lecture halls. The initial design of the building was conducted to house the various sections of the library but most parts of the building were converted to lecture halls and offices especially for the faculties of arts and social science.

Most students who had used the library complex for their lectures and examinations were moved to temporary locations.

 A source at the university said the fire incident had occurred while students were writing the first semester examination and some of the exams already written had to be rescheduled because the answer scripts had been affected by the fire.

 The source said the university had developed a plan to manage the situation and students from faculties of arts, social sciences, environmental science, management science, education and natural sciences who wished to use library resources were asked to go to the library at the main campus at Bauchi Road.

Towards the end of last year, our correspondent observed that shelves had been mounted for new collections of the affected faculties as part of strategy to restore library services. All library activities had continued at the main campus which had earlier been converted into an e-library.

Five months since the inferno, there has been rush to restock the newly mounted shelves with books and other periodicals. The university had on the 20th of October 2016 launched Operation “Beauty from Ashes” as part of efforts to get books and cash donations to resuscitate the Naraguta library and has already compiled a great deal of books and cash donations from home and abroad.

Some students also launched the ‘Project Testify (refilling our bookshelves)’ and have since raised over 600 books for the university. So far, the university’s website shows 59 names of individuals and organisations on the honour list of donors for books, cash or both. The institution’s librarian Dr. Stephen Akintunde, said the list is not exhaustive as most recent donations are yet to be updated. The university’s principal staff including the Vice Chancellor had also donated N1million each as part of their contribution to the cause.

Shortly after the incident, students and staff had no choice but to access intellectual materials from the huge back up of digital resources in terms of books and journals which are found in the institutional repository and arranged according to different disciplines. However, Dr. Akintunde wrote on the University’s website in November that library circulation services for the affected faculties had begun at the Bauchi road main campus, and so books can be borrowed and read in the library.

 

He said a number of persons have responded to the “Beauty from Ashes’’ project and the institution had two collection points for materials in South Africa and the United States of America. “For the materials in South Africa and the USA, we are still collecting them and when we have a large quantity we will ship them to Nigeria, we may need to ship them in a container,” he said. 

 

The librarian said the response from individuals and organisations have been overwhelming, adding that; “A lecturer in Japan wrote to the Nigerian embassy when he learnt about the incident and wanted to donate, so the Nigerian embassy wrote to us and we replied, directing him to the collection centre in the US to make his donations.”

Though over 100, 000 intellectual materials, some of which are very rare, have been lost, the Vice Chancellor, Prof. Maimako, recently told the National Librarian, Professor Lenrie Aina, that he was encouraged by the many donations the institution had received through the operation ‘Beauty from Ashes’ programme it launched.