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its own information support for whatever project is going on in the locality. The library will also provide a forum formutual interaction among officials at the local level, which may be difficult at their various ministries andheadquarters. To be able to play the coordinating role successfully, the library in the rural area will have to pay moreattention to its own extension activities than is usual in the urban areas.University LibrariesSome university libraries in Nigeria have taken certain steps to bring together different sections of theircommunities. The first is the establishment of Leisure Reading Collection (LRC). Two universities did this severalyears ago. In 1967 the University of Ife Library (now called Hezekiah Oluwasanmi Library, Obafemi AwolowoUniversity, Ile-Ife) established an LRC. The idea was copied from the University of Ibadan where such a collectionexisted.The collection covered all subject areas like history, biography, science, religion and philosophy. Current fiction anddrama predominated. At Ibadan students who wished to read books outside their degree programmes for purposes ofinformation and pleasure used the collection a great deal. More importantly, wives of staff, mainly expatriates,borrowed immensely from the collection. At Ife, the same principle and similar objectives informed the introductionof the collection (Dipeolu, 2002). The point to emphasize here is that, with the LRC, the two universities extendedtheir services beyond the staff and students, whom they were primarily established to serve, to wives of staff, whowere neither students nor staff themselves but members of the university communities. By so doing the libraries alsoinculcated the reading and library use habit in those patrons. They also developed in the patrons effective library useby teaching them the skills and techniques of using a collection of this kind as a basis for library use in later life.Secondly, the Customary Court Records of Hezekiah Oluwasanmi Library has always attracted users from differentparts of the country especially the six states of the South-West. The library inherited the records of all the oldcustomary courts of the old Western Region of Nigeria from which Lagos State, Ogun State, Oyo State, Osun State,Ondo State and Ekiti State have been carved out. Today users patronize the library to obtain photo copies ofjudgments of cases handled by the customary courts, especially on land disputes, whenever such cases are revisitedin higher courts of the land.Thirdly, at Joseph Ayo Babalola University, Ikeji-Arakeji, in Osun State, two of the resources of the library alwaysbring patrons from different sections of the community together. The first is the e-library, which we shall discussmore about later. The second is the Reprographic Section. Members of the Ikeji-Arakeji community use thisresource a great deal. In this section the people make photo copies of documents such as birth certificates, drivers’license, vehicle license and academic certificates. The lamination of the original copies of such certificates is alsodone in the section. By this effort the library brings town and gown together.ICT and the New LibraryLibraries all over the world are beginning to be more interactive than passive. ―The coming of ICT into the libraryhas completely changed the face of the library to more of a social networking centre. This is the only way you canattract young audience to use the library outside reading to pass examinations‖ (Akinbulumo, 2008). A good numberof public libraries in the developing countries now have restaurants, snacks shop and computer games for the youngaudience as well as the adults. The new innovation has shot up the number of young people that use the library ormake the library their second home. This has also cut down on crime rates in some of the countries.According to Onuoha (2008), the library at Loma Linda University in California has fully redesigned its readingspaces. They now have ―the quiet library reading area and the interactive areas.‖ In the quiet reading areas you canhear a pin drop. The interactive reading areas are however different. They have the computer here for browsing.There is also a vending machine in that section. One can buy drinks and biscuits and take them in the interactivereading areas. This is so because the computer is interactive and when users go there they want to interact withothers to ask for help on the system and other things. Some patrons actually spend all day working with computers.That is why the library makes provision for inter-personal interaction and something for the stomachs of those whowant to spend time in the library.201