Transforming Communities: The Roles of Public Libraries in Nigeria

Public libraries are libraries attached to communities to meet the information needs of every stratum in that community irrespective of their age, sex, religion, tribe, and political affiliation. Public libraries are funded mainly by the government, private individuals, and other well-meaning donor agencies. Public libraries are playing great transformational roles in the communities they are serving, some of such roles include; educational support, political awakening, economic value boost, research assistance, arousing reading interest, training, and retraining, health awareness promotion, cultural and leisure development as well as makerspaces to mention only but a few. Despite the enormous transformational roles of public libraries to their communities, they are still been limited by a lot of challenges, some of which includes inadequate funding, poor reading culture, staff incompetency, poor remuneration of library staff, inadequate facilities, decaying infrastructure, epileptic power supply, and inadequate ICT tools. It is recommended from the study that the government should adequately fund public libraries to enable them to acquire sufficient information resources and facilities, the government should ensure librarians and other staff of public libraries are well paid to motivate them to put in their best, and librarians in public libraries should regularly do community needs assessment to be able to ascertain areas to channel their programmes. New roles are evolving for public libraries rapidly in this 21^stcentury faced with a lot of societal problems.