Ghana's Chief Librarian Visits N.Z. On Rockefeller Grant

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29718, 11 January 1962, Page 2

Ghana's Chief Librarian Visits N.Z. On Rockefeller Grant

Ghana’s Director of Library Services is visiting Christchurch on a Rockefeller grant. She is Miss Evelyn Evans, one of the very few public librarians trained in the United Kingdom to be awarded this grant for a world tour. Miss Evans came to New Zealand at the suggestion of the Rockefeller Foundation to study the co-ordination of libraries here and the establishment of the Dominion’s national library’.

“Ghana has a country-wide library service but no coordination among the libraries, and it has no national library." she said in Christchurch yesterday. “The Rockefeller Foundation felt that though much has been achieved in Ghana more should be done about coordination. New Zealand libraries are held in high regard and its national library has been established recently New Zealand is also a comparatively young country, and for these reasons it was put on my itinerary.” “Hungry For Learning” Ghana was hungry for learning, she said. Only about 20 per eent of the people were literate, but free, compulsory education had been introduced since the country’s independence, and literacy would increase by leaps and bounds. So would the demands on library services. Already 50 per cent, of the country’s library members were primary school children. “Not many Ghanaians read for recreation; they read mainly educational books. They love economics, and are very interested in anything about central and local government or on Africa in general,” she said. “We are trying to encourage them to

read also for recreation.” Most adult library users were at the student level, and there was great difficulty in getting enough books to satisfy them. Many Ghanaians studied by correspondence from England if they could not afford higher education in their own country, she said. “Reading rooms in lib-

raries are a great boon to students because conditions at home are not always conducive to reading,’ she said “We have started putting books into the primary schools and we have already covered two-thirds of them. Special mobile libraries take the books to the country schools. “We cover the 92,000 square miles of Ghana with 14 fulltime libraries staffed by chartered librarians, by parttime libraries run by voluntary personnel, mobile libraries, by sending out book boxes and with postal services,” Mias Evans said. The whole of the library service is run by qualified Ghanaian librarians trained by in-ser-vice and attendance at English library schools.” “Miss Library" Miss Evans has become so closely associated with her work that she is known by many merely as “Miss Library.” When Miss Evans went to Ghana from her home in England 16 years ago, the only library service was a small British Council library —no public libraries at all. For her work she was awarded an M.B.E. and later a C.B.E.

“There is much more library work to be done in Ghana, and I hope we get as much support from the Government in future as we have received in the past in our effort to build up a national library with a bibliographical centre and a good reference library,” she said. Since leaving Ghana Miss Evans has visited Kenya, Pakistan, India, Burma, Indonesia, and Australia. From New Zealand she will go to Fiji, Hawaii, the United States, Canada, and Scandanavia. As she has only been in New Zealand a short time she was not ready to make any comment on its library services. “But it seems to me that libraries throughout the world have the seme problems—shortage of staff and lack of space,” Miss Evans said.