The Akwa Ibom state government has come under some scrutiny after it was revealed in a Premium Times investigative report that the state’s much hyped e-library did not have a working website, which is essential to an electronic library.
The multimillion naira “e-library” physical site was commissioned by the state governor, Godswill Akpabio and President Goodluck Jonathan, who was there for the tape cutting, with much pomp and pageantry.
However, the Premium Times investigation revealed that the magnificent structure had no web platform, which is key to any electronic library anywhere in the world.
Aniekan Umana, the state’s information commissioner, had assured the Times on Tuesday that the library did have a website, but it failed to provide a link, telling them on the phone to “Google it”. At the time of their publishing their report on Wednesday, the information commissioner was yet to provide that link.
However, in comments responding to the story on the Premium Times’ website, one reader took offense to the story and provided us with the long awaited website url, which the information commissioner had been reluctant to provide.
The url, http://www.akselibrary.org/index.php, takes us to a website that looks like this:
Screen grab of the e-library's website
However, the website has all the markings of a rush job. Besides having a poor design, the links on the site don’t function. The “Read More” button that should lead users to a page with information on registration, brings them right back to the homepage.
The social network buttons, including Facebook and Twitter links, at the bottom of the hastily patched up website are still not functional. Don’t bother visiting the “Contact” page or the clicking on “About Us” as both pages were blank (at the time of writing this article). It lends credence to suspicions that the state government started putting together this website after the information commissioner told the Premium Times to “Google it”.
Web pages still blank on the website
A blank page that is supposed to hold information about the e-library
At the flamboyant commissioning of ill-equipped electronic library, Akpabio reportedly described teh edifice as the first of its kind in West Africa and said the library has digital collections of 16.5 million e-documents”which can be accessed by users [online] simultaneously”.
In case you were wondering, those e-documents don’t exist online on the e-library’s shabbily put together website.
