The presidency of Nigeria has opened up on its plans to address lack of direct access to archival documents about Nigeria by giving a rare opportunity to students to take a tour of the State House Library and acquaint themselves with relevant information going forward.
The permanent secretary, State House, Mr Tijjani Umar, dropped this hint yesterday in Abuja during the launching of ‘A Handbook for Modern Archives and Records Management,’ which was written to address poor culture of record keeping and management in Nigeria.
Africa Daily News, New York reports that the book was authored by the archivist and record management desk officer at the State House, Mr Aboi Matthew Simon which was supposed to push a paradigm shift to aid professionals in the art of record creation, management, security, preservation and information dissemination.
Umar said the programme is part of an institutional contribution as custodian of documents about Nigeria’s history which the younger generation in the internet age need to know in order to make them appreciate the diversity of the country, while instilling in them the culture of reading, recording and archiving.
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He said, ‘As our own contribution as an institution, we are in custody of documents about the history of Nigeria, which we all need to appreciate the great nation that we all are part of and so what we understand is that not everyone has access to those documents and that information, so we are going to begin the programme where public and private schools, especially secondary schools are going to be given opportunities to come on a tour of the State House Library and then I thought they would appreciate Nigeria’s diversity which is a very huge area of our strength collectively’.
Also, Simon said his book was written out of zeal to complement previous works and help eradicate the herculean task of shorting information by providing solutions with modern record management archiving.
‘The book seeks to fill in the gap to complement the much that has been made, but yet need to go a long way in terms of archiving, record management, especially the modern archives and records management practices because when you look at archives today, what you see is records are kept like junks in pools of dirt and quite often if you go to record managers, it is a herculean task for them to sort out any information that is needed,’ he said.
Reviewing the book, Prof G. O. Alegbeleye of Babcock University, Ilesha, Remo said the book stimulates public and private sector officials to examine their current methods of coping with their records problems and the benefits that may be derived from well-planned programmes.
