Training for religious information literacy and community dialogue: the experience of WOREM Theological College, Southeast Nigeria

This paper discusses steps taken by the author who served as a volunteer librarian in WOREM theological institute to train and equip clerics/participants who were students of the institute with library, literacy and research skills to enable them impact their community and harness religious historical data. It was discovered from an earlier research on clergy information needs that there was dearth in indigenous religious history and data; more so works cited were mostly records on foreign missionary activities in Nigeria decades ago. It was therefore needful to attempt bridging this gap with related research using local communities by the student-clerics, totaling 35 in number. Most of them only attempted secondary school education and were not really proficient in spoken and written English. However, these were influential leaders and overseers of religious congregations in about twelve surrounding villages under four Local Government Areas. Their peculiarity became added advantage in generating indigenous and other primary data. The Institute’s library set up in 2009 spearheaded the literacy training effort which spanned for a year and half. Training sessions handled by the Volunteer librarian (author) were on library use skills, research methods, grammar and speech drills, writing and vocabulary tests, weekend exchange programmes, site visits to city libraries, language translation workshop, internship, seminar and other presentations, as well as computer rudiments in data storage and dissemination. Final training sessions culminated in field research using a structured interview format to generate socio – religious, historical and contemporary data. The entire exercise thereby established that in considering tools for ‘open dialogue’, the human factor becomes a vital first-hand resource..