ROLE OF AGRICULTURAL LIBRARIES IN THE TRANSFORMATION OF AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN NIGERIA

Agricultural libraries has a lot of vital role to play in the transformation of agricultural education to enable sustainable development in Nigeria. Agriculture in Nigeria has been given prominence among the sectors of the economy. Agricultural institutions were established to cater for agricultural education. research and extension of rural agriculture. Agricultural libraries provides information services to farmers, students, livestock producers, agricultural business organizations, research workers subject specialist teachers, this is in anticipation to meet the challenge of man, food and hunger and to make for a sustainable development. Five agricultural libraries and their parent body were examined and their role in the transformation of agricultural education for sustainable development were explored, the problems limiting their sustainability such as poor funding, resistance to use of modern information technology, lack of formal training, government neglect, poor bibliographic control were explored and recommendations offered, like introduction of short term courses to educate farmers and the inclusion of modern information technology in the curriculum on database searches, information retrieval engines, retrieval software