Definition
A special library according to the dictionary of library and information science is the one established and funded by a commercial firm, private association, government agency, nonprofit organisation, or special interest group to meet the information needs of the employee members, or taf in accordance with the organisation goals.
Brief History of Special Libraries generally
The idea of “special libraries” in the context of sharing a collection of books to a targeted audience was by no means novel. The first known libraries, dating back to the beginning of known history, recorded commercial transactions and inventories. Today, these fall under the heading of corporate libraries, discussed below. The concept of “special libraries” as a distinctive category of libraries emerged in the United Kingdom and the United States in the nineteenth century. The burgeon of various special library association ensued the founding of American Library Association (ALA) in 1876. The Medical Library Association was found in 1898, followed by the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) in 1906. The Special Libraries Association (SLA) was found in 1909 with 20 librarians.
EVOLUTION OF SPECIAL LIBRARIES
The Special Libraries Association
The Special Libraries Association was founded in 1909 in the United States by a group of librarians working in specialized settings, led by John Cotton Dana, who served as the first president of SLA from 1909 to 1911. In the years prior to SLA’s founding Dana and other librarians saw an increasing demand for the types of materials that specialized libraries could provide, and recognized that as information professionals working in such settings responded to the demands of their jobs they were creating a new kind of librarianship. Also, many of them were working as professional librarians but largely without the professional support enjoyed by other librarians and professionals. The group sought to address their common problems by banding together. Their goal, as stated in the first issue of Special Libraries , was to “unite in co-operation all small libraries throughout the country; financial, commercial, scientific, industrial; and special departments of state, college and general libraries; and, in fact, all libraries devoted to special purposes and serving a limited clientage.” As at this time one can understand that the term ‘special library’ was not in full existence. Hence, SLA can be regarded as the pioneer of special libraries. Also Special libraries association came into being in this way: A few large enterprises, private, public and quasi-public, discovered that bit paid to employ a skilled person and ask him to devote all his time to gathering and arranging printed material out of which he could supply the leaders of the enterprise, on demand or at stated intervals, with the latest information on their work.
This Librarian purchased periodicals, journals, proceedings of societies, leaflets, pamphlets, and books on the special field in which the employers are interested, studied then, indexed them, or tore up or clipped from them pertinent material and filed it under proper headings, and then either held himself in readiness to guide managers, foremen and others, directly to the latest information on any topics they might present, or compiled each week or each month a list of pertinent, classified references to the last words from all parts of the world on the field covered by his organisation’s activities, and laid a copy of this list on the desk of every employee who could make good use of it.
Roughly described, this is the method of controlling the special information the world was offering them which perhaps not more than a score of progressive institutions had found it wise to adopt up to five or six years.
At that time the public library of Newark was developing what it called a library for men of affairs, a business branch. This was in a rented store close to the business and transportation center of the city. The library’s management believed that men and women who were engaged in manufacturing, commerce, transportation, finance, insurance, and allied activities could profitably make greater use than they had heretofore of information to be found in print. They were sure that this useful industrial information existed, for they knew that the most progressive among men of affairs in this country, and still more in Germany, found and made food use of it. Indeed, they knew that they already had in the main library’s collection much material which almost any industrial organisation and almost any industrial worker could consult with profit. Such material was already used to a slight extent in the central building; but they believed that if what might be called ” the printed material fundamental to a great manufacturing and commercial city” were so placed and so arranged that it could be easily consulted by men of business, the habit of using it would spread very rapidly.
From the first it was evident that the library was entering a field not yet greatly cultivated. There were guides to selection of material; there were no precedents to serve as rules for handling it when found. Professional library literature did not help, because this particular form of library work had never been undertaken. It was not difficult to learn that the old rule, gather everything possible, index and save forever, must be here in the main, discarded, and the new rule, select, examine, use and discard, be adopted. But to put the new rule into practise was very difficult.
The name Special Libraries was chosen with some hesitation, and rather in default of a better; but it seemed to fit the movement admirably. It may be said of course that every library is in a measure special, in its own field and that state libraries, libraries of colleges about universities, of medicine, law, history, art and other subjects may be called special. But a special library and the special departments of more general libraries like the business branch at Newark are the first and as yet almost the only print-administering institutions which professedly recognize the change in Library methods.
SUCCINCT ORIGIN OF SPECIAL LIBRARIES IN NIGERIA
Special Libraries in the Nigeria have contributed their quota to the industrial technological, social and economic development of Nigeria. The first special libraries established in Nigeria were those of the High Court and Ministry of Justice, Lagos with the initial collections of colonial law books in 1900, (Igbinoba, 1995). This was followed by the establishment of the Department of Agriculture Research Library in 1910 at Moor Plantation Ibadan.
Libraryconscious 