By Aluta News
Oct. 18, 2021
The Industrial Training Fund (ITF) on Monday in Jos organised its annual Library Week to educate and inform its staff and the public on the essentials of reading.
The Week, whose theme is: “Library Matters: Building a Reading Culture”, was declared open by the Director-General of the fund, Sir Joseph Ari.
Ari said the aim of the annual event was in furtherance of the Fund’s continuous efforts at ensuring well-rounded staff that were mentally and intellectually prepared to drive achievement of the Fund’s onerous mandate.
Represented by the Director of Information and Communications Department of the fund, Mr Dickson Onuoha, the director-general said the Fund’s
first Library Week was organised in 2007 and was aimed at boosting the reading culture of the ITF staff and other users.
He said that as a leading Human Resource Development Organisation in Nigeria with the wide ranging mandate to provide, promote and encourage the acquisition of skills, the ITF is expected to be “ahead of the field in the discovery of new and trending skills, information and knowledge”.
“For us, therefore, knowledge creation is a sine qua non. “You cannot give what you don’t have.”
“Therefore, for the ITF to sustain the momentum of growth, increase relevance and its position as a leader in the ever-changing and fast-paced knowledge economy in Nigeria, we must embrace and imbibe a strong reading culture, otherwise, our vision of aspiring to be among the best in the world will not be fully realised,” he said.
Ari also said that organisations that embraced a reading culture built creative and innovative teams that set the tone for development in their sector.
According to him, a reading organisation is basically a learning organisation that will remain ever relevant as they are able to adapt to any change in the environment that is occasioned by either technology or policies of Government.
He stated that reading was not only for organisational growth alone but also benefited the individual as the act aided developing the individual’s thoughts, cognitive mental stimulation and brain exercising, vocabulary and knowledge expansion, stress and tension relief and helped with depression and dysthymia, amongst others.
The director-general said that the ITF Library offered an array of services and opportunities for knowledge growth within its community, as the library had a wide range of books on various subject matters for diverse readers.
He also stated that the library was not open to only staff of the Fund and their children/wards but also to members of the general public desirous of taking advantage of its immense resources.
Earlier, the Director of Research and Consultancy of the fund, Dr Zachariah Piwuna, in his welcome address, said the Library Week was an annual affair of the fund organised to educate and inform the staff of the fund and the public on the essentials of reading.
Piwuna said that the week commenced with a competition at the Fund’s staff school.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the event featured book reviews by staff of the Fund.
NAN also reports that staff from different departments of the Fund were picked as reading ambassadors to promote the culture of reading in the various departments of the organisation.
NAN