Thankfully, I got to have an experience of what it was to have access to a functioning library. Sadly though, this only came towards the end of my time in secondary school. I’ve mentioned countless times that I went to a government school, and in my opinion, it could compete with several top private schools academically because of what they gave.
We had laboratories for just about all the subjects that required it, we had functioning computer rooms that we used, and we had studios for technical drawing, one of my favorite subjects in secondary school. And of course, we also had a library. Sadly though, while everything else was functioning, the library took some time to be opened up.
For a long time, it wasn’t in use. When I was in JSS1, it was an uncompleted building. It was when I got into SS1 that they started major renovations. They built it, finished and painted it. But for about a year or so, it still remained locked. Not until my last days in SS2 and when I got into SS3. That’s when they opened it and I finally had access to the library and all the wonders it had to offer.
Unlike my fellow students, I wasn’t interested in the textbooks that were there. After all, I already had my textbooks. Instead, I focused more on the novels. I read books like Animal Farm, Arrow Of God, Sizwe Bansi Is Dead… and so many others. The library was also good to read in when I was preparing for my WAEC because it was somewhere you could read without getting distracted. It was only during that period that I took advantage of the large catalog of academic books.
But then, fast forward to a few years later, I gained admission into Nekede and I tried to use the library there. There were, of course, a lot of textbooks there. Books that covered basically all topics that the school offered. Hell, I even remember seeing an entire section dedicated to programming and Javascript at the time. That was how serious it was. There weren’t novels though, they didn’t do that there apparently.
So, what am I saying? I have a level of experience when it comes to libraries. My country is one where we don’t seem to have a lot of them. You only get functioning libraries in schools, but getting one run by a local or state government is almost impossible. And in this day and age, I feel that it is very important. We need this especially now when reading is becoming increasingly difficult due to people having a low attention span.
Reading traditional books, and having to manually flip pages from time to time will do us a lot of good. We simply get to turn off our phones and curl up on a good chair to read our favorite stories, enjoying them the way we used to in the past. Libraries are important and we shouldn’t lose them. So yeah, we still need libraries. Besides being a place to gain information, it’s still a place to store knowledge. Libraries can’t be hacked, and the only thing that can destroy them is if they’re razed by fire.
So, no matter how advanced we get, we still have to keep the libraries. It’s very important!
