The Professor's Notebook
Things I think about out loud
Essays, reflections, and honest observations from the intersection of libraries, AI, and intellectual life.
Featured Essays
The pieces worth reading slowly
22 publications spanning 2005 to 2026, with 444 total citations. Research grounded in African realities, recognised in international peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.
Artificial Intelligence, Intellectual Authenticity, and Deep Scholarship: Rethinking LIS in The Digital Age
The FASS Lecture delivered at LAUTECH under the chairmanship of Vice Chancellor Prof. R. O. Rom Kalilu. The full argument: AI does not threaten scholarship because it is powerful. It threatens scholarship because it is convenient. And convenience is the enemy of the kind of effort that produces original thought.
Two Years as University Librarian: What the Work Has Taught Me
A candid reflection on what two years of leading the Olusegun Oke Library has felt like from the inside. The decisions that were harder than they looked. The wins that took longer than expected. The conviction that has not wavered: the library is a position, not a building.
What Busan Reminded Me About Why This Field Matters
Three Things the National Leadership Conference 2026 Shifted in Me
Reflections from the National Leadership Conference 2026 at GOTNI Leadership Centre, Transcorp Hilton, Abuja. Three convictions: from position to people, from activity to impact, from individual performance to collective capacity. The one about proximity still sits with me.
Regular Posts
Ideas that keep coming back
Shorter pieces published regularly on LinkedIn. The kinds of ideas that start as a nagging question and become a post you did not plan to write.
What happens to deep thinking when AI can think for you?
The question is not whether to use AI. It is whether we are being intentional enough about what we are preserving in the process.
The library stopped being a building. It became a position.
Busy is not the same as productive.
The loneliness of being the one who cares.
Research culture in Nigerian universities — an honest conversation.
Something shifted in how we read, and most of us did not notice.
EBSCOhost, Koha, AGORA — why the tools only work if the people do.
The databases were there. The system was there. What was missing was the conversation about how to make them part of how people actually work.
On being first, and what it costs.
Every first carries a weight that the people who come after rarely see. That weight is worth carrying. But it should be named.
What do we mean when we say a student is cheating?
AI has made this question more urgent. But it was never a simple question to begin with.
About this section
Why I write what I write
I write regularly about libraries, scholarship, technology, leadership, and what it means to do serious intellectual work in African institutions. Some of it is professional. Some of it is personal. Most of it is both.
Academic writing has its place — the peer-reviewed paper, the rigorous argument built for other specialists. But there are ideas that live in the space between the paper and the conversation. This is where those ideas live.
I have been told that some of what I write connects with people who are not librarians at all. That is the point, really. The questions that keep me up at night — about attention, about the nature of knowledge, about what it costs to keep caring when institutions make it difficult — are not only questions for LIS professionals.
The recurring questions
- What happens to deep thinking in a world that rewards speed?
- How do African institutions build knowledge infrastructure from within, not import it from outside?
- What does it mean to lead something — a library, a team, a field — and still remain honest about what you do not know?
- Is AI a tool, a threat, or a mirror held up to what we have already let go of?
- What do we owe the people who come after us in this field?
Media
These ideas belong in a larger conversation
If something here resonated, share it. If you want to continue it, get in touch.