Postgraduate Students’ Awareness and Search Skills for Accessing Online Library Databases in Nasarawa State University, Keffi, Nigeria

Abstract

Nasarawa State University Library invests so much despite the shrinking budget by subscribing to online databases to ensure that users including postgraduate can access online information databases. However, observation and statistical usage of the online library databases are low. This is evidenced in the three years of statistical usage of ScienceDirect generated by Elsevier. This report is worrisome to stakeholders and thus, calls for a study of this nature. Based on the abovementioned scenario, the study investigates the postgraduate students' awareness and search skills for online library databases. The study population comprised all the postgraduate students registered with the university library, totalling 2,540. A survey research design was adopted for the study. A simple random sampling technique was employed in this study, where 254 postgraduate students, representing 10%, were selected as a sample. A questionnaire was used as the instrument for data collection. The data collected was analyzed using a bar graph. Results show that postgraduate students' awareness of ProQuest, ScienceDirect, Westlaw, Bloomberg Law, and Hinari is very high. Most respondents used the title search technique (253) to access information resources on online databases. There is a need to create and provide access to courses online tutorials on how to locate information quickly through a variety of channels.