The librarians’ perceptions of awareness, availability and accessibility of information resources and the control of COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

This paper determined the level of perception of the effect of information resources awareness, availability and accessibility on the control of covd-19 pandemic among Librarians in Nigeria. A survey research design was employed through convenience sampling technique with a questionnaire as the instrument. The target population is the Librarians in the tertiary institutions. The online questionnaire was sent through an individual e-mail address.188 valid responses were observed after three months.The research questions were answered  descriptively while an inferential statistic through regression analysis was used to test the null hypothesis.Findings revealed that the Librarians’ perception of awareness, availability and accessibility of information resources had a significant effect oncovd-19 pandemic control at F(3, 187) =88.371, P <.001, R. 59. Further, the standardized coefficient result revealed that awareness, had a significant effect on covd-19 pandemic control with β=277, t=4.720 at p≤ .001, availability had a significant effect on covd-19 pandemic control with β-116, t=2.249, p≤.005 while accessibility to information resources had the highest significant effect on covd-19 pandemic control with β-.848, t-14.226. p≤0001. The results agreed with the descriptive analyses which indicate that awareness, availability and accessibility had a high effect on covd-19 pandemic control with a combined high effect. Awareness, availability and accessibility of information resources” is vital for librarians' job performance, especially during a disaster such as the covd-19 pandemic. This is the area previous studies in the context have not considered, that is the novelty of this study.