By Mashe Umaru Gwamna
The American University of Nigeria (AUN), has announced that its new bricks-and-mortar “smart” library will open in May 2014.
AUN is the winner of one of three international awards given by the American Library Association (ALA) last year for Innovative International Library Projects.
The University in a statement quoted its President, Dr. Margee Ensign, saying “the new library will not be the world’s biggest university library but that it will be among the smartest.
On his part, the University’s Librarian Amed Demirhan, said, “The new home for AUN library will advance the application of information technology to organizational structure, space and collection.”
Mr. Demirhan, who started the first digital library in the University of Kurdistan, Iraq, explained that AUN’s “smart library is basically like a smart phone. It’s multi-functional, efficient, has more services, and because it deals with e-resources, it doesn’t require as much space. Instead, we have space to add more services that were once taken up by hardcopy books, resulting in greater efficiency and effectiveness.”
