Scholarly communications and Publishing, Open (Science, Access, Data, Educational Resources...), Digital librarianship, Indigenous Knowledge Systems, and of course, Poetry resonate well with Idowu.
Adegbilero-Iwari Idowu a.k.a. Adeniyi Adegbilero Idowu is a native of Ijan-Ekiti, a neighbouring farming
community to Ado-Ekiti, the capital city of Ekiti State, southwest, Nigeria. He
obtained a good Bachelor’s degree in Agriculture before proceeding into his
preferred profession of Library and Information Science upon completing his
MLIS programme at the University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria in 2010. Idowu has
since worked in three libraries as Digitization Consultant at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture of the CGIAR Group, before a stint at Elizade University
where he started as Emerging Technologies Librarian/ Head, E-Library Services
in 2014 and later as the Scholarly Communications
Librarian, the first Nigerian to serve in that capacity in a Nigerian library. He also served as the Library Coordinator, leading the University Library in acting capacity between March 2018 and February 2019 with distinguished accomplishments. Idowu currently works as Scholarly Communications Librarian at Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti (ABUAD) where he first served as Medical Librarian in 2011-2014. As an adept at scholarly technologies with special mastery of the Open Journal Systems, Idowu manages ABUAD journals' workflows, API integration and customizations of the journal management system on which they are hosted. He in particular serves as the Journal Manager of ABUAD Journal of Natural and Applied Science where he coordinates editorial workflow, platform configuration, and other scholarly enrichment services such as assignation and registration of digital object identifier (DOI) to published contents.
Idowu is a well published rising academic
with moderate citation index that positions him in the top percentile of most cited
scholars in his unit in the university. His research papers and other professional thoughts
have received good reviews with overwhelming comments from peers around the
world. He has also presented conference papers, seminars and posters to both
local and international audiences.
Idowu is a winner of many
prestigious grants and scholarships. In 2015, he won the Carnegie Grant to
train at the University of Pretoria, South Africa alongside other librarians from
five Carnegie African countries. He is also a winner of the prestigious Jay Jordan IFLA/OCLC Early Career Fellowship award for the year 2016. This gave
him, with four other young librarians, opportunity to travel across three US
states and the DC to understudy libraries and librarians. He recently received FSCI 2018 scholarship to attend the summer course in scholarly communications at the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla, CA., USA in July/August, 2018. Idowu returned to FSCI 2019 at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in August to co-teach the course AM6- When Global is Local with leading scholars from Canada, Argentina and Algeria. He was offered a specialised Board Grant to attend the Library Publishing Coalition Forum in the spring of 2020 at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA.
Idowu successfully led a team of researchers to submit a project proposal to participate in the Mellon Foundation-funded Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute at Duke University, Durham, NC., USA in October, 2022. The cross-regional team represents a good example of North-South collaboration of scholars/librarians from Canada- Prof Dan O'Donnell; Algeria- Prof Samir Hachani; Canada/United States- Dr. Nathan Woods; Bangladesh- Shaharima Parvin; Nigeria- Dr. Adetomiwa Basiru and Idowu Adegbilero-Iwari. The team's project, "Towards Curing the Predatory Publishing Malady in the South: Community of Practice Approach to Developing Local Strategies and Toolkits", is now being developed into a broader project named Southern Network for Open and Ethical Publication Practices (SNOEPP) to be hosted at http://www.snoepp.org/.
In furtherance of his work in open science, Idowu received the Open Research Funders Group (ORFG) Seed Award grant for his 2024 project titled "Towards Understanding the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science to Drive Open Science Adoption in Higher Educational Institutions in Ekiti State, Nigeria". In October 2024, he was co-winner of the Supporting No-fee (Diamond) Open Access Publishing in Africa grant for the project titled “Expansion and Sustainability of Diamond Open Access for the Journal of Sustainable Development Law and Policy and Outreach to Journals in Southwest, Nigeria” awarded by EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) in collaboration with WACREN and AJOL for 1 year. He later in the year became one of 3 Nigerians who were part of the 17 African librarians that won the competitive Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) Africa Delegates Sponsorship to the 2nd Global Diamond Open Access Summit in Cape Town, South Africa from December 8-14, 2024.
Idowu is a member of many online,
international and local professional associations. He was honoured with membership
of the American Library Association, the oldest and largest library association
in the world in 2016/17. He is a Certified Librarian of Nigeria (CLN) who is
passionate about open access, scholarly communications, technologies in libraries, public and community
library development and modernization of the library environment. He is a seasoned presenter and trainer on
emerging scholarly technologies. He has organized and facilitated numerous training
programmes within and outside his institution some for which he won
internationally competitive grants (e.g. INASP/UNESCO OA Week Grant). As head of the University Library in 2018, he organised the maiden edition of Elizade University Visiting Library Scholar Lecture which was delivered by Prof Daniel Paul O'Donnell of the University of Lethbridge, Canada. He also worked with the ICT Directorate and the Department of Computer Sciences, Elizade University, to propose and host the first Summer Course in Digital Library Management with moderate record of success.
Idowu is the founding Coordinator/Chairman of Cooperating Libraries
for E-resources (COOLfER), a library consortium that ensures libraries have
regular access to scholarly databases at the lowest possible cost. He is part of the founding members of Nigeria Coalition of Librarians for Open research (NiCLOR) and Assistant Coordinator of the group. He manages
the Blograrian, a weblog about
libraries and other issues at https://blograrianinfo.blogspot.com/.
Idowu is full of precious ideas to transform librarianship in Nigeria and also
impact on the future generation of societies by investing his time, energy and
resources in today’s children.
Idowu is married to Oluwaseun, a
scholar, and are both blessed with children.
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