Origin and development of multilevel library and information education on the Аfrican continent

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to characterise the main stages of the evolution and current vectors of development of tertiary library and information education in African countries. Research methodology. Complex application of systematic, historical, and comparative approaches, as well as empirical methods of scientific cognition enable revealing the main stages of evolution of tertiary library and information education on the African continent, determining the factors that influence its development and modernisation and contribute to the gradual transition to a multilevel model and transformational educational standards. The scientific novelty of the work is based on the results of comparative and content analyses of the Bachelor, Master, and Ph.D. degree programs in the Library and Information Sciences at African national universities in historical retrospective. These results reveal the main stages of development of Library and Information tertiary education, as well as vectors of its modernisation on the African continent. Conclusions. The study of the genesis of library schools in African universities, as well as content analysis of the introduced educational programs in training specialists at different educational levels allowed determination of the main stages of the evolution of tertiary library education on the African continent. In particular, these stages are as follows: the stage of emergence (early 1960s – late 1980s), the stage of active development (1990 – 2000s), and the stage of modernisation changes (2010s – present). However, even now, only 10 per cent of African countries have educational units that provide two or three levels of tertiary library education. The main factors behind the slow development of multilevel library and information education in African countries are the insufficiency of academic and teaching personnel who would ensure the high production rate of Masters and Doctors of Philosophy in the field of Library and Information Sciences; underestimation by African countries’ governments of the role of high-quality training for information specialists and, as a result, an annual reduction in the number of budget places in the Library and Information Sciences specialty; poor organisational, methodical, technical, and technological infrastructure for ensuring the educational process.

Keywords: tertiary library education, Africa, history of tertiary library education, digitisation of education, diversification of library science educational programs.