Extent of the Usage of Electronic Library Facilities in Colleges of Education in South-West Nigeria

Abstract

The place of libraries in any academic environment cannot be over-emphasized. However with the advent of social media provided by computer and its associated resources, students are now found of hardly visiting and consequently using convetional libraries . Instead students are now commonly found of being adapted to the use of electronic social media. Since students are now commonly found of using social media resources such as facebook, twitter, e-mail, etc, it then become imperative to see the possiblity of adapting these media to library practice. The study investigates the extent of utilization of electronic library facilities by students in colleges of education. The study was guided by two research questions and two research hypotheses. The population of the study was made up of students in all public colleges of education in south – west Nigeria. A sample of nine (4 federal and 5 state-owned) out of the thirteen public colleges of education in south – west Nigeria was taken using simple random sampling technique. A total of twenty – five students from each of the sampled college was taken to make a total of two hundred and twenty-five respondents using stratified random sampling technique. Data was collected using a questionnaire titled Extent of Usage of E-Library Resources Questionnaire (EUELIRQ) with reliability co-efficient of 0.87. Responses to items in the questionnaire were analysed using percentages, frequency counts and t-test methods. Findings revealed that male students have more favourable attitudes towards the use of e-library resources than their female counterparts and that the use of e-library resources was not affected by students’ course(s) of study. It was recommended, among others, that government should provide more enabling environment for the favourable of e-library resources in our colleges of education in Nigeria.

Keywords: Electronic library, colleges of education, computers, e – library resources