An academic publishing organisation specialist, Elsevier, has sought the partnership of the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) towards the capability development training for its library staff.
The Area/Accountant Manager, Mr. Victor Okeugo, who led a 3-man delegation, stated this on Monday, June 19, 2023 during a courtesy visit to the Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Olufemi Peters at the headquarters of the university in Abuja.
Elsevier, established in 1880 with speciality in academic publishing, has evolved to become an information and analytics company that provides an array of tools and research intelligence solutions.
According to Okeugo, the thrust of the visit was to primarily conduct a series of capability development training for the library team.
“Our visit is aimed also at providing some of these trainings to the library team in the university. We have organised a few trainings online before now, but we believe that the librarians are positioned to act as consultants to the research community in their institutions,” he said.
They used their visit to commence the process of equipping library staff with the knowledge they require to function in this capacity.
“We basically facilitated trainings on a number of topics, including ScienceDirect, Scopus. NOUN has subscribed to two of our solutions – ScienceDirect and Scopus. As an organisation, our main focus is not just to sell subscriptions, but also to ensure that these solutions are able to make a marked impact on the institutions.
“In addition, we work with our subscribing institutions to ensure that they develop modern and updated competencies in research,”he added.
While appreciating the NOUN management, he said the partnership/training engagements will not only be utilised by the staff of the university but will drive awareness and enhance usage of Elsevier solutions that the institution subscribes to.
“This will lead to improvement in the institution’s research output and consequently improve NOUN’s global visibility, ranking amongst others,” Ukeugo said.
Responding, the Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Olufemi Peters, represented by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Academics, Prof. Uduma Oji Uduma, said NOUN remains open to cooperation with any organisation which would seek improvement to NOUN education and expose its staff to internationally-recognised concepts they may not normally have access to.
“In NOUN, we are aware of the importance of library. Library is a repositor you cannot do without,” he added.
The DVC further expressed the university’s happiness with the honour as the organisation deemed it fit to partner with NOUN.
On her part, the University Librarian, Dr. Angela Okpala, had earlier said the key areas of the partnership were creating awareness and training that is not only for the librarians as well as how to acquire research skills and make research robust.
