Library Services And Literary Forms Of Yoruba Oral Traditions

Introduction

The library as an organisation is primarily charged with the responsibility of selecting, acquiring processing, preserving and disseminating different forms of information. Over the years, the scope of the work of librarians and library services in general are becoming vast in nature. The world is in the age of information explosion hence, the need for information to be classified and stored in a way that could facilitate easy retrieval and utilization by potential users. The explanation above throws a great deal of light on the cross-disciplinary nature of the library profession in general. The central concern of the librarians is information management irrespective of the form or area of knowledge. He therefore stands as a specialist in information management and as a generalist', he tries to befriend all areas of knowledge.

Apart from dealing in the printed and conventional forms of information, the training of Librarians has catered for their involvement in the gathering of oral evidence and cultural studies while literature has also revealed that academic libraries have a cultural role to play in the society. To this end, the role of libraries in the collection of oral traditions cannot be over-emphasized. The African society in general and the Yorùbá community in particular are essentially oral ones because traditions in the pre-literate Yorùbá society were transmitted from mouth to mouth4. This has been responsible for some queries raised by European scholars against the use of oral evidence as good research material. The question raised were that of reliability and validity. However, African Studies have over the years, proved and adopted oral evidence as a dependable source of information. Even though much attempts had been made to collect and preserve this form (writing and documentation are parts of the efforts), much is still being left undone. The intervention of librarians is therefore one of the ways evolved by scholarship in solving the problems stated above. In line with the explanation above, this paper seeks to take an overview of the role of Library services in the collection and preservation of Yorubá oral traditions with emphasis on three literary forms, namely, folktales, riddles and proverbs.