ASSESSMENT OF SKILLS AND COMPETENCIES OF ACADEMIC LIBRARIANS FOR SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATON: A CASE OF PRIVATE UNIVERSITIES IN THE GREATER ACCRA REGION OF GHANA

ABSTRACT

The last decade or two has witnessed the rise in the setting up of private tertiary education in Ghana, most of which are set up in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana. These private institutions are attached to their respective academic libraries which support the teaching, learning and research need of the institutions. Since these institutions are that of higher learning, it is imperative that their librarians develop high level of knowledge and skills in the major areas of scholarly communication so that they can contribute meaningfully to the research processes and activities in their respective institutions.

This study adopted both exploratory and quantitative methods. In all, thirty academic librarians from various private universities were selected as the population of the study. The instrument used to collect data was the questionnaire. The questionnaires were personally distributed to the respondents by the researcher. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to analyze the data collected from the study.

The study revealed that academic librarians of the Private Universities play critical roles in academic research which include increasing access to information, promoting information literacy, institutional repository management, ensuring copyright compliance among others. It was also discovered that librarians of the private universities have intermediate level knowledge on the various practices under research data management. Formal education was found to be the most effective mode of training librarians.

Recommendations made based on the findings of the study include advocacy and training of librarians, development of robust and sustainable methods of identifying training needs of librarians and the formation of a proactive and collaborative unit by the librarians to exchange knowledge and expertise.