Idowu

Scholarly communications, Open (Science, Access, Data, Educational Resources...), Digital librarianship, Indigenous Knowledge Systems, and of course, Poetry resonate well with Idowu.
Adegbilero-Iwari Idowu aka 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 where he first served as Medical Librarian in 2011-2014.

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 has recently been 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 is a member of many online, international and local professional associations. He was honoured with the 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 library, 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.