Meet your Academic Services Librarian #5

This year we will do a series of posts introducing you to the members of the Academic Services Team. This time it is the librarian for Computer Science, and Mathematics and Physics.

Sahm Nikoi

I grew up in a part of the world characterised by “book famine”. In the West, the concept of a library brings up a particular image; this image is completely different in many parts of Africa today where libraries are frequently described using terms like “community resource centre”, “rural library”, “suitcase library”, “barefoot library”, “camel library” and “home library” to mention a few. After sixth form, I was posted for my National Service to a community in Cape Coast where I worked with the Ghana Library Board to promote reading skills in primary schools. Because the main library was a few kilometres away I was forced to find some innovative ways of delivering library services to the community and the wheelbarrow provided the answer, an experience which gave birth to a lifetime career in Library and Information Services. I therefore like to describe myself as the wheelbarrow librarian (see pg. 184).

I left the Ghana Library Board in 1990 and joined the British Council, and later as Head of Information Services developed services targeted at government policy makers, staff in higher education and social development activists. This was followed by work with the Methodist University-Ghana.  Following the completion of my PhD in 2005, sponsored by the Ford Foundation International Fellowship, I worked as a teaching assistant at Loughborough University.

In 2008 I joined the Beyond Distance Research Alliance at Leicester University as a research associate working on a number of projects funded by the JISC on Mobile Learning and Open Educational Resources.

Currently I am part of Academic Services in Information Services where I provide support to students in the area of information literacy and I am the academic librarian responsible for the Institute of Mathematics and Physics and the Department of Computer Science. In my spare time I like to read and watch documentaries on the on-going debate between religion and science.