A library fellow in equatorial West Africa

Information Outlook, July, 1998 by Carol Elliott

My stay in Ghana was the result of the recommendation of lawyer-librarian Jo Ann Humphreys for a Library Fellow to provide much-needed law librarianship training in the country. She had visited Ghana in late 1994 at the request of the United States Information Service (USIS). Following this visit, the Cultural Affairs Officer and the librarian at USIS in Accra submitted a proposal for a United States Information Service/American Library Association Library Fellow.

Goals of the Fellows project in Ghana were to provide training and consultation to strengthen library services, help train law library staff on current American legal research in order to increase the knowledge of U.S. librarianship and law librarianship, survey current available systems, assist in the refinement of collection plans, and design and teach a course in legal research. Current legal library/information storage, retrieval, and dissemination systems were also reviewed. A key component of the project was to propose a workable network plan for law library systems in Ghana.

To achieve these goals, I provided training and consultation through weekly visits to libraries including the University of Ghana Faculty of Law Library, Ghanaian Parliamentary Library, Supreme Court Library, Ghana School of Law Library, Council for Law Reporting Library, Law Reform Commission Library, and the Attorney General's Department Library, and by teaching a four-month hands-on legal research course for law librarians titled, "Law Librarianship and the Legal Research Process," This course encompassed several aspects of librarianship, including cataloging, classification, marketing, administration, collection development, selective dissemination of information techniques, and document preparation.

The Fellowship also succeeded in proposing and receiving two grants and one donation to obtain multimedia computers with Internet connectivity. Two grants were received from the U.S. Ambassador to Ghana's Democracy and Human Rights Fund, one for computing equipment for the Supreme Court Library, the Ghana School of Law Library and the University of Ghana Faculty of Law Library, and one for computers for the Council for Law Reporting Library and the Attorney General's Department Library. At the Fellow's request, the U.S. Agency for International Development donated two multimedia computers with Internet connectivity, one for the Law Reform Commission Library, and the other for the non-governmental organization FIDA Ghana Legal Services Center, an affiliate of the International Federation of Women Lawyers (Spanish acronym FIDA).

I also requested and received CD-ROMs containing cases from the United States Supreme Court for three law libraries from Michael Wolf of the American Bar Association Africa Law Initiative Legal Education Program. During the Fellowship, Wolf received guided tours of the law libraries on a USIS-sponsored visit.

Library-related projects included teaching a comparative legal research component of the Advocacy and Legal Ethics course at the Ghana School of Law for the fall term 1997. The ten weekly sessions, attended by ninety students in their final year of a two-year program preparatory to admission to the Ghana Bar, focused on a comparison of Ghanaian, British, and U.S. print and non-print legal research tools and their uses. I also assisted the non-governmental organization, FIDA Ghana Legal Services Center, with computer training and collection assessment.

Although not explicitly stated in the project description, it was appropriate for me to become involved in the completion of the USIS-sponsored Central Law Library Project, another of the recommendations of Humphreys. Books and equipment, consisting of a photocopier and computer with modem, printer, and scanner were purchased with part of a grant from the U.S. Democracy and Human Rights Fund. Following my arrival, the Central Law Library was commissioned by Mr. Justice I.K. Abban, chief justice, Supreme Court. The books and computers are now being used at the Ghana School of Law. I used the balance of the grant to purchase the Small Library Information Management System (SLIMS) library cataloging software recommended by Humphreys in her report for three law libraries.

Ancillary activities of the Fellowship included observing FIDA lawyers provide legal literacy training to queenmothers in the Western Region of Ghana, working on a development plan for community libraries throughout Ghana; attending many school library openings; speaking at the Ghana Library Association Annual Congress; and addressing a library school class at the University of Ghana.

By using the new technologies acquired during the Fellowship, law librarians in Ghana can now begin to contribute to the global library community.

Carol Elliott, reference librarian, University of Arizona College of Law Library, Tucson, Arizona. For more information on International News or to contribute to the column, please contact Barbara Hutchinson at: 1-520-621-8578; fax: 1-520-621-3816; e-mail: barbarah@ag.arizona.edu.