Availability and IT Skill as Catalysts of the Use of OPAC among Undergraduates in Federal Universities in South West, Nigeria

Abstract

The study investigated availability and ICT skills as catalysts to the use of OPAC among undergraduates in federal universities in South West, Nigeria. The descriptive survey design was adopted for the study. Probability sampling technique was employed to select 400 out of 79,336  undergraduates in four federal universities in South West, Nigeria for the study. Data collected for this study was analyzed using simple percentage and frequency counts, mean and standard deviation. The study found that there was high level of Online Public Access Catalogue availability in federal university libraries in South West Nigeria. The study revealed that the ICT skills required for the use of OPAC among undergraduates in  federal university libraries in South West, Nigeria include knowledge of the use of Boolean operators (OR, NOT, AND) and truncation (*) search strategies. Also to know the position of a particular material on the shelf, to ascertain whether or not a book is present in the library are a good  purpose for the use of OPAC by undergraduates in federal universities in South West, Nigeria. This study also found that, OPAC availability will lead to its usage among the undergraduates. Consequently, university libraries should conduct various user education programmes at the beginning
of each academic session for undergraduate students so that they can be aware of the availability of the OPAC which is a major step to the use of OPAC.

Keywords: Availability, ICT Skills, Use of OPAC, Undergraduates, South-West, Nigeria.