To follow up here is what I did to get it working on Arch Linux:
>pacman -S guile ;;installs Guile 2.0.9
>wget
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gu/guile-ncurses/guile-ncurses.tar.gz
>mv ./guile-ncurses.tar.gz ~/builds
>cd builds
>tar -xzvf ./guile-ncurses.tar.gz
>cd guile-ncurses
>makepkg
>pacman -U guile-ncurses-1.4-1-any.pkg.tar.xz
>pkg-config guile-2.0 --variable=extensiondir
/usr/lib/guile/2.0/extensions
>mv /usr/local/lib/* /usr/lib/guile/2.0/extensions ;;move libraries to expected location
>cat ~/.bash_profile
#
# ~/.bash_profile
#
[[ -f ~/.bashrc ]] && . ~/.bashrc
export GUILE_LOAD_PATH=${GUILE_LOAD_PATH}:/usr/share/guile-ncurses:/usr/share/guile/site/2.0/ncurses
>pacman -Qi guile-ncurses
Name : guile-ncurses
Version : 1.4-1
Description : Guile bindings for the GNU NCurses library
Architecture : any
URL :
http://www.gnu.org/software/guile-ncurses/ Licenses : GLPL3
Groups : None
Provides : None
Depends On : guile ncurses libunistring
Optional Deps : None
Required By : None
Optional For : None
Conflicts With : None
Replaces : None
Installed Size : 425.00 KiB
Packager : Unknown Packager
Build Date : Wed Nov 20 17:52:56 2013
Install Date : Wed Nov 20 17:56:09 2013
Install Reason : Explicitly installed
Install Script : No
Validated By : None
I do not have an LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable.
Thanks
Mortimer