Chapter
1

THE PROBLEM–ITS BACKGROUND

Man’s pursuit for knowledge has led to the
formation and accumulation of remarkable amount of information. This pursuit
for knowledge knows no parameters and limits and is never satisfied. It has
continued since the birth of civilization to the modern age. This hard-earned
knowledge and information is treasured for the entire mankind and therefore
accountable to be well-kept. With the discovery of paper man has been able to
express this knowledge to others by writing books. Thousands of manuscripts
have been written by the wise men of the previous times but many of them were
ruined due to the lack of proper means of preservation. With the invention of
printing press, it became easier to preserve the knowledge in the form of
printed documents. This steered to the generation of a large number of books.
The need for the preservation and distribution of information led to the
creation of more and more libraries.

Over the years, many libraries have supported
education efforts by providing teaching resources, information and referral
services. A more active method has been taken by libraries proposing
educational classes or one-to-one tutoring programs. Many libraries have
outreach programs intended to meet the needs of specific groups of people with
limited educational skills. 

An
interchange is usually between two or more associations involving a momentary
exchange of resources, while an exchange will comprise cooperation on a wider
scale, to contain exchange of all kinds of materials, exchange of information
(for both staff and reader inquiries), user access to participating libraries,
sharing of bibliographic catalogs, union lists, and other bibliographic utilities,
and cooperative training programs of personnel of participating libraries.

Library
cooperation states to a mutually beneficial sharing of resources established by
two or more libraries, or, it may be an umbrella term for a wide scale of
cooperation procedures and instruments for libraries.

According to Agbo (2013), from time immemorial, both terms ‘knowledge
and information’, which are central to the topic of our seminar today have
remained the ‘stock in trade’ or better still, the ‘articles of trade’ in
libraries and librarianship. From its earliest, humble beginning, libraries
have, till today, been closely associated with and thus closely related to both
concepts. Hence, knowledge and information have remained the familiar ‘focus of
interest’ of libraries and librarianship thus giving rise to the term knowledge
society which has