High Quality Design on a Low Budget by Dorothea Sommer Janine Schmidt Stefan Clevström

Author:Dorothea Sommer, Janine Schmidt, Stefan Clevström
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 2016-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 8.1: The new library building, ready 2012. (Photograph by Makerere University).

Makerere University’s vision is “to be the leading institution for academic excellence and innovations in Africa”; while its mission is “to provide innovative teaching, learning, research and services responsive to national and global needs”(Makerere University 2015). Makerere University’s motto is “We build for the future”, and the University has indeed continued to build and rebuild what was destroyed during the civil wars and turmoil of the 1970s and 1980s. For example, various buildings have been constructed, multi-disciplinary and ground-breaking research has been published, various scientific innovations have been reported, support from development partners has increased and the periodic webometrics ranking of universities show that Makerere has steadily been improving. The improvements have attracted students from within and outside Uganda and Makerere has continued to build for the future of Uganda and beyond.

Even after becoming an Ugandan University, Makerere has continued to attract students from different parts of the world as the 2012/13 academic year admission list shows, for example, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Botswana, Cameroon, Chad, Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Liberia, Libya, Malawi, Namibia, Nigeria, Southern Sudan, Somalia, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe; Britain, Canada, China, Denmark, Germany, Korea, India, Italy, Norway, Philippines, USA and Sweden. Consequently, Makerere University’s admission has risen to over 36,500 students of whom over 3,000 are graduate students.

The growing number of University students, the increase in study programmes coupled with paradigm shifts in curriculum and research, the increase in research and the rapid information and communication technology developments have all changed the routines of traditional academic librarianship. The changes are very demanding in a Sub-Saharan African university environment where shortages of infrastructure and facilities are very common due to decreasing budgets. These changes and demands, therefore, need an innovative librarian who, by using various initiatives and networks, seeks to meet the never-ending needs of university library users by creating and maintaining quality library space using the meagre financial resources available.

This paper reports the construction of a new library building extension that doubled the existing space using locally generated funds. That achievement resulted from innovative library leadership, good planning and support from the University administration (Figure 8.1).

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