Snapshot of the Status Quo of Selected Zimbabwe School Libraries

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the challenges and opportunities faced by selected school libraries in Zimbabwe. It is based on the observation that the school's library system in Zimbabwe, including rural schools, is plagued by a plethora of challenges ranging from neglect in relation to funding and policy issues. It is from this perspective that this chapter seeks to deeply understand and address the challenges and opportunities faced by Zimbabwe's school libraries. The study adopted interpretivism approach and was qualitative in nature. It is a multiple case study with purposively eight schools being selected to be part of the research. Some of the findings noted were that expensive schools mainly frequented by the elites had modern libraries which are manned by qualified librarians with most of them being well remunerated. This was not the case with rural schools in which there were no libraries whilst those with libraries had few outdated and irrelevant books and there were no trained librarians in those schools.