College and Research Libraries 168 College & Research Libraries March 1983 Deployment of Professional Librarians: A Barrier to the Availability of Publications in a Developing Country Georgiana K. N. Nwagha INTRODUCTION The primary aim of librarians and infor- mation scientists is to serve users by pro- viding them with access to recorded infor- mation. To accomplish this aim there are two requirements: the first is to help users recognize which records may be of inter- est and, secondly, to make it possible for the user to have access to these records. It is obvious, therefore, that universal bibliographic control (UBC), whose pri- mary aim is to aid users in the discovery of what records of interest exist, is not enough in itself. In fact, it has been argued that it is no use providing an ever fuller and faster supply of references if the docu- ments to which they referred cannot be obtained. 1 To satisfy users, publications themselves must also be accessible to any- one. It has thus been realised, both by in- ternational bodies, such as IFLA and UNESCO, and by individual countries, that to derive the full benefit of the efforts towards UBC, there must be a programme of universal availability of publications (UAP). 2 The present exponential growth of pub- lications and the ever-increasing cost of printed materials mean that not even li- braries in the most highly developed countries can hope to satisfy all the infor- mation needs of its users. As a result, re- source sharing among libraries is increas- ingly being accepted as the only realistic means of maximizing the availability of materials and services needed for schol- arly research. Unfortunately, in the devel- oping countries, where the inadequacy of individual libraries is felt more acutely, certain barriers decrease the availability of publications, and resource sharing among libraries cannot be relied upon to maxi- mize the availability of documents. Sev- eral of these barriers have been identified in the literature3' 4 and need not be elabo- rated here. They include shortage of funds, insufficient and unsatisfactory photocopying machinery, poor postal sys- !ems, shortage of foreign exchange, and madequate union lists. However, there is one factor that has hitherto not been clearly identified, nor even realised as a barrier to the availability of publications in some developing countries. This is the de- ployment of professional librarians in li- braries, which is quite distinct from the lack of a sufficient number of trained li- brarians. Deployment means the actual jobs performed by the available profes- sional librarians. These jobs can vary from administrative duties, acquisitions and technical services such as cataloging and classification, to reference and readers' services. The degree to which users' needs are served depends on which of t~ese ~utie~ are performed by profes- siOnal hbrar1ans. This paper will in fact demonstrate that the performance of ref- ere~ce services in a research library in Ni- gena by a professional librarian does affect the level of availability of publications to users. METHODS A survey of eighteen agricultural re- search institute libraries in Nigeria was carried out by means of a self-completed questionnaire. Sixteen of these institutes were established and financed by the fed- e:al government of Nigeria to promote ag- ncultural research and production. One is an international institute for tropical agri- Georgiana .K. !"· Nwagha is principal serials librarian, University of Science and Technology Library Port Harcourt, Nzgena. ' cultural research, while the eighteenth is the Faculty of Agriculture of the Univer- sity of Nigeria. The institutes were chosen to ensure an even coverage of the different geographic regions of the country. Each of the institute libraries was sent multiple copies of the questionnaire, and library personnel at the reference desk were requested to fill out one copy each time a research scientist made a demand for a publication during a period of six months. The aim was to enable the li- braries to keep a record of the sources used in satisfying demands (whether from local stock or from another library), the satisfaction time (measured in hours or days), and the reasons for failure in cases where the demands were not satisfied. The questionnaire also requested that the rank of the reference personnel be stated; that is, whether the reference personnel was a professional librarian or a nonpro- fessional member of the staff. After two or three reminders, fourteen of the eighteen libraries returned the com- pleted questionnaires at the end of the re- cording period and a total of 506 forms were received. The questionnaires were coded and analysed by means of the Sta- tistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). RESULTS The initial analysis showed that only three out of the fourteen libraries had a professional reference librarian involved in completing the questionnaire. In the other eleven libraries, nonprofessional li- brary personnel carried out the reference functions. It was further discovered that in the first group of libraries (that is, those with professional reference librarians), 85 percent of the demands made by the re- Research Notes 169 search scientists were satisfied, whereas 95 percent of the demands were satisfied in the second group of libraries (see table 1). These results would tend to indicate that the research libraries with nonprofes- sional reference personnel had a higher availability level than those with profes- sional reference librarians. However, further analysis of the data in- dicates that this was not the true state of affairs. Table 2 demonstrates that 99.2 per- cent of the demands made at the libraries without professional reference staff were satisfied immediately from the local stock of the libraries. On the other hand, only 67.5 percent of the demands were satisfied from the local stock of the group of li- braries with professional reference staff. Also, while the latter group of libraries sat- isfied 32.5 percent of the demands made with materials obtained from other li- braries, it was revealed that little interli- brary borrowing was done by the group of libraries without professional reference li- brarians. There are two possible explanations for this situation. Either the second group of libraries did not engage in interlending be- cause the nonprofessional reference per- sonnel could not for some reason initiate interlibrary loan requests, or the research- ers using these libraries did not request materials that were not available in the li- braries . Considering that Nigeria is a de- veloping country, it is not likely that these libraries are self-sufficient and could sat- isfy all the demands of the researchers, as indicated by the data. Rather, it was sus- pected that researchers using libraries whose personnel were nonprofessional were consciously suppressing some of their document needs because of a pre- conceived knowledge of the capabilities of TABLE 1 PROPORTION OF SATISFIED DEMANDS Satisfi ed Unsatisfied Demands Demands Total Types of Libraries No . % No. % No. % Libraries with professional reference librarian 80 85 14 15 94 100 Libraries with nonpro- fessional reference personnel 391 95 21 5 412 100 Total 471 93 35 7 506 100 170 College & Research Libraries March 1983 '#- 0 00 the library personnel serving them. Con- 0 00 ""'" ""'"""'" sequently, it was decided to test whether the rank of the reference personnel in the til libraries surveyed had an effect on the 0 !- information-seeking behaviour of the re- search scientists. 0 0 ""'"""'" To do this, the actual demands made by 00 0\" z C"'l-.:1' the agricultural research scientists at the different institute libraries were catego- rized into two types of questions: simple locational questions and complex refer- '#- 0 C"'lO ence questions. This categorization was ~ c:i,...; based on that of K. Emerson, who had cat- "' egorized reference transactions into two "' main groups-directional questions and t>O z reference questions. 5 On the basis of this "' ~ categorization, demands that were satis-"5 0 fied immediately, simply by locating rna-0 l.() ""'"I.() z terials on the shelves of the libraries con- r.J) cerned, were classed in the first category (/)0 as simple or quick-reference questions . .....JZ O < ~E-< z • There is no relationship between the ~ oo .5 rank or qualification of the library per-~~ r..t.~ 0 N N-.:1' sonnel manning the reference desk of a r.fl. ..... l-1 ..... r:: ...... the rank of the library personnel and the :a ~ «i r:: ~ .9 id :9 g; § -~ g; ~ tn til source from which materials were ob- :: ·t: ·.-4 ~ ·c ~ Q) 0 tained. ~ ~~J)~8~E-< 0.. ,..o~;..::,..o P.,.QJ However, since the chi-square test by it->.... ...... • ..... !- .....J .....J self could only indicate that the variables tested are related, it was found necessary to carry out two further analyses to assess the strength of the relationship between the two variables. The phi coefficient, which is specifically for 2 x 2 table, was found suitable, as it makes a correction for the fact that the value of the chi-square is directly proportional to the number of cases, by adjusting the X value. Both the phi value of 0.50 and the contingency coef- ficient value of 0.45 indicate that there is a fairly strong association between the two variables. Table 4 shows that the chi-square value for the second test is 229.52, with one de- gree of freedom. This value is again much greater than the critical value of 3.84 at Research Notes 171 0.05level of significance. The null hypoth- esis could therefore be rejected and there is an indication that a relationship exists between the rank of the library personnel and the type of questions asked by re- search scientists. As in the case of the first hypothesis, both the phi and contingency coefficient tests for statistical significance were carried out to measure the strength of the association between the variables. The values of phi (which is 0.67) and the contingency coefficient (which is 0.55) both establish that there is indeed a strong relationship between the two variables. CONCLUSION The results of the above two tests have confirmed the suspicion that the agricul- TABLE 3 CROSS-TABULATION OF RANK OF REFERENCE STAFF BY SOURCE OF DOCUMENT Rank Count Row Pet Col Pet Tot Pet 0 Nonprofessional 1 Professional Column Total Raw chi-square = 119.56 with one degree of freedom Phi = 0.50330 Contingency coefficient = 0.44957 Local Stock 388.0 99.2 87.8 82.2 54.0 66.7 12.2 11.4 442.0 93.6 Source Another Library 3.0 0.8 10.0 0.6 26.0 33.3 90.0 5.7 29.0 6.4 TABLE 4 CROSS-TABULATION OF RANK OF REFERENCE STAFF BY TYPE OF QUESTION Rank Count Row Pet ColPct TotPct 0 Nonprofessional 1 Professional Column Total Raw chi-square = 229.52 with one degree of freedom Phi= 0.6735 Contingency coefficient = 0.55862 Type of Question Simple Complex Question Question 379.0 92.0 95 .0 74.9 20.0 21.3 5.0 4.0 399.0 78 .9 33.0 8.0 30.8 6.5 74.0 78 .7 69.2 14.6 107.0 21.4 Row Total 391.0 82.8 80.0 17.2 471.0 100.0 Row Total 412.0 81.4 94.0 18.6 506.0 100.0 172 College & Research Libraries tural research scientists using those li- braries manned by nonprofessional ref- erence personnel were consciously sup- pressing some of their demands for docu- ments. Were demands for materials out- side the libraries' stock being suppressed because the researchers did not have con- fidence in the library personnel's ability to obtain such materials for them, or was it because of the poor success rate of such demands in the past? The answers to these questions can be established only through further research into the motives behind the information-seeking behav- iour of the research scientists and into the reasons for present decisions in the de- ployment of librarians . This would require the adoption of qualitative research meth- ods such as less formally structured inter- views and free-flowing discussions. How- ever, it may be concluded that the presence of nonprofessional library per- sonnel in the reference context of some of the agricultural research libraries sur- veyed has contributed to the nonutiliza- tion of documents outside the stock of the libraries. It should be pointed out here that all the eighteen research libraries surveyed had at least two professional librarians on their staff. Thus, the fact that eleven of the four- teen libraries that responded had nonpro- fessional reference personnel was a result of the internal deployment of staff in the March 1983 respective libraries and not because of a total absence of professional librarians. Presumably, the professional librarians in these libraries were deployed in other ser- vice areas, such as administration, acqui- sition, or technical services, where their expertise was felt to be most needed. This situation would tend to lead one to agree with Wilkinson and Miller that ''at times, indeed, the field's pre-occupation with the internal mechanisms of library operation appears to have been little less than disfunctional in terms of the library's role in society. Expertise in selection, in processing and in administration are rec- ognized by the initiated as being essential to effective library operation. To the pub- lic, however, recognition is given only to the end product-the ability of the li- brary's staff to negotiate satisfactorily, a physical or intellectual translation of infor- mation that meets the user's needs." 6 At the beginning of this article, it was stated that the primary aim of librarians is to serve users by providing them with ac- cess to recorded information. Professional librarians in Nigerian research libraries could make positive efforts to achieve this aim by deploying professional staff in ref- erence services. Thus, professional exper- tise could be used for providing the clien- tele with access to needed documents irrespective of the location of such publi- cations. REFERENCES 1. D. J. Urquhart, "UAP: What Can We Do About It?" IFLA Journal4:338-42 (1978) 2. International Federation of Library Associations, "Medium Term Programme" (The Hague: IFLA, 1976). 3. M. B. Line, "Planning Interlending Systems for Developing Countries: A Summary andRe- sponse," Interlending Review 9:93-97 (1981). 4. G . K. N. Nwagha, "Barriers to the Availability of Scientific Journals in Nigeria," International Li- brary Review 12:201-7 (1980). 5. Katherine Emerson, "National Reporting on Reference Transactions, 1976- 78," RQ 16:199-207 (Spring 1977). 6. J.P. Wilkinson and W. Miller, "The Step Approach to Reference Services," RQ 17:293-300 (Sum- mer 1978).