Students’ perception of E-Resources in an Academic Library: The Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta experience

Abstract

This paper examines students’ perception of e-resources in academic libraries: case study of the serial’s section of ‘Nimbe Adedipe Library, Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria. The survey research method was adopted for this study. A structured questionnaire was designed and used to collect data for this study. The population under study constitute the number of students that came to the serial's section over a period of a month which was Four Hundred and Forty-One Students’ (441). The method used for the selection of the population was simple random sampling. Data were collected from the selected students using questionnaire as the main instrument for data collection. The questionnaire was designed to identify the important variables to be measured. These are perception of students to e-resources, access to e-resources, usability of e-resources and challenges encountered in using these e-resources. Copies of the questionnaire were given to students as they came into the serial's section. 500 Level students’ were 168, while 400 level students’ were 159, also 300 level students were’ 49 making a total of 376 undergraduate students‘ and post-graduate students’ were 65 students’ respectively. All the questionnaires was dully completed and found usable for the study. Findings revealed that both postgraduate students’ and undergraduate students’ perception of e-resources are on the positive side because they perceive it as been useful for their research and this is having high impact on usage of these resources at the Serial Section of the library.

Keywords: E-resources, E-services, Serial’s Section, Perception, Awareness, Challenges