Merging of Library and Information Services: The Bank of Uganda Experience

Many corporate bodies are making organizational changes to reflect the changing roles of libraries and information centers. One increasingly common response to the changes is to reorganize the the departments involved in library services so that they are part of a corporate information services department. Most organizations have got a corporate library as well as a department that offers services relating to public information dissemination, officially mandated to propagate official information of the organization. Integration of the library with the public information services department gives opportunities as well as challenges for the library. According to Oden (2001), full integration of disparate sources of information requires merging the library and corporate information services and in most cases, this merging develops greater information variety both in structure and focus. This paper examines the opportunities and challenges of this merging by taking Bank of Uganda as the case where the corporate Knowledge Management Centre was recently merged with the public information services division of the bank. With the coming to the scene of real time information platforms, majorly social media, the library has found itself in a position where it has to adapt to these new technologies. By the same token, the public information services department has found these real time information platforms to be very handy in as far as information dissemination is concerned. This technological transformation has meant an increasing overlap between library services and public information services, making and integrated approach more sensible. The major source of data will be by literature review as well as by participant observation.