AVAILABILITY AND REMOTE ACCESSIBILITY OF ACADEMIC LIBRARY SERVICES IN NIGERIAN UNIVERSITIES DURING THE COVID-19 LOCKDOWN

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the state of operations of academic library services in the Nigerian Federal Universities by assessing the existence of functional library websites and remote availability and remote access to library services during the COVID-19 lockdown. All the academic libraries in the 43 Federal Universities form the population of the study. A purposive sampling technique was used to sample all the 43 academic libraries. Results indicated that 10 (23.3%) of the libraries had no functional websites while 33 (76.7%) of the libraries had websites and subscribed to various e-resources some of which were library Internet Protocol (IP) restricted. With regard to the availability and remote access to information resources, 17 (39.5%) of the libraries had websites but had no online information services available and none remotely accessible to users from remote locations. Three (7.0%) of the libraries had very few digital resources, and they are remotely inaccessible. Only 13 (30.2%) of the libraries provided tangible information sources that were available online and remotely accessible during the lockdown. It was concluded that many academic libraries in Nigeria failed to provide remote library and information services during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, and this would force users to access other unverifiable sources of information

Availability of Books and Other Informational Materials and the Use of Academic Libraries.

Gone are the days when librarians perform duties manually except for the few libraries that have not automated their services. Ability to store up-to-date materials, retrieve them for use by the prospective users is very important. A good library is judged by the effective utilization of the resources of the library. The materials must be accessible to their users without the wastage of precious time. With the advent of computers and the internet, library operations have become simplified, faster, more accurate and current. Learning, teaching and research have become more interesting and less stressful as it used to be. Fears been expressed in some quarters that with the advent of computers and internet in libraries, the traditional librarians may become redundant and irrelevant in the scheme of things, may not be 100% correct as there are some minute and local information that may be so necessary to the researcher that may not be the internet Serials/periodical should be given proper place in the acquisition policy in any academic library in such a ration of 70:30 for books and periodicals respectively. Proper retrieval system should be put in place so that the materials so acquired will be put into judicious use. African Research Review Vol. 1 (3) 2007: pp. 51-6

Digital Best Practices in RIE Bhopal Library: Engaging Users with Transformative Library Solutions during Covid-19 Pandemic

Pandemic COVID-19 has severely affected all walks of life for last two years and still continuing. During the pandemic academic libraries played an important role in providing resources and services to students and teachers using digital technologies in innovative ways. This paper highlights how the digital best practices followed by the RIE Bhopal library came into force in providing various services to its users during the crisis time. The paper also describes the best practices followed in the Institute library for providing various services to users at home with the hardware, software, Internet and social network platforms available in the Institute library system. Among the best digital practices of the library, use of Open Source software in different operations, remote access to e-resources, Digital Document Delivery Service, e-mail alert service, Institutional Repository, etc. are a few. Decade long use of technologies experienced to say that the innovative ways of using digital technologies increases the quality of services, sets benchmark and ultimately brings elevation in the image of the library among the user community. In time to come, these digital best practices will definitely help the Institute library and motivate other libraries to meet the information requirements of users in best possible way

Effective library provision in Ghanaian Communities: case study of Dunkwa–On–Offin Branch library

Public library is an integral part of the community. It has the social obligation to serve the whole community. This study examined the effective library provision in Ghanaian communities, in order to ascertain the problem of low patronage of community libraries in Ghana. The population for the study comprises registered and non-registered patrons of the facility. From the total population of 300, a sample of 100 respondents were drawn and used for the study. Out of the 100 questionnaires administered, 96 were completed and returned. Descriptive statistics was used to analyze data using frequency counts, tables and percentages. The findings shows that majority of the users were students who use the library for study purpose. The study also revealed that information resources were outdated and facilities provided in the library was inadequate and inappropriate, culminating in low patronage of the facility. This situation was due to poor funding from both national and local government to the Ghana Library Authority who are mandated to oversee the operations of the community libraries in the country. The researchers suggested that the government and all stakeholders in the education sector must ensure proper financial support to libraries to enable them acquire and procure all necessary logistics that can improve quality of services. Also Internet facilities should be available in all community libraries to ensure generation of incomes to support their operations

Digital Literacy Skills of Undergraduate Students of Library and Information Science on the Utilization of Electronic Information Resources in Two Federal Universities in Nigeria

This study examined digital literacy skills of undergraduate students of Library and Information Science on the Utilization of Electronic Information Resources in Two Federal Universities in Nigeria. Five (5) objectives were framed to guide the study. The descriptive survey design was adopted. The population of the study was 250 final year students comprising 182 and 68 students from the Departments of Library and Information Science, Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike, (MOUAU) and University of Uyo (UNIUYO) from the 2015/2016 session, respectively. The accidental (aka convenience) sampling technique was used to select 120 respondents for the study. Data were collected using the structured questionnaire from 122 respondents who completed and returned their questionnaire. This yields 93.33% response rates. The Data generated were analysed using the descriptive statistics to determine the frequency counts and mean scores in accordance with the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (IBM-SPSS Version 23) model. Findings of the study reveals that the electronic information resources available for the students in the two universities are: e-dictionaries, e-encyclopedias, Internet search engines (Google, Wikipedia, etc.), e-newspapers, e-research reports, online databases, e-journals, e-books, and CD-ROMs databases. It also shows that the digital literacy skills of the students include: electronic mailing skills; Internet surfing skills; social networking (social media) skills); basic computer operations skills (e.g. type-setting, formatting, printing, etc.; electronic search and retrieval skills and skills for accessing electronic resources via diverse search engines. The findings further shows that the students acquire digital literacy skills through: digital technology training programmes/practical sessions in their universities; formal lectures as part of course works; self-sponsored IT training programmes; trial and error; and assistance from friends. On the uses of digital literacy skills by the students, the finding reveals that digital literacy skills are used for: typesetting, formatting, and printing of documents; downloading of e-resources for academic works; sending of assignments and term-papers online for assessment by lecturers and social networking. The findings reveals that factors facing digital literacy skills of the students are: epileptic electricity supply; high cost of digital skill training programmes; inaccessibility to internet facilities; inadequate digital facilities, lack of conducive digital literacy learning environment; and poor teaching methods by IT lecturers. It recommends that university-based library schools should design and implement digital literacy programmes to educate and train undergraduate students to develop knowledge and practical skills on the use of digital technologies

Efficient Implementation on Low-Cost SoC-FPGAs of TLSv1.2 Protocol with ECC_AES Support for Secure IoT Coordinators

Security management for IoT applications is a critical research field, especially when taking into account the performance variation over the very different IoT devices. In this paper, we present high-performance client/server coordinators on low-cost SoC-FPGA devices for secure IoT data collection. Security is ensured by using the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol based on the TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256 cipher suite. The hardware architecture of the proposed coordinators is based on SW/HW co-design, implementing within the hardware accelerator core Elliptic Curve Scalar Multiplication (ECSM), which is the core operation of Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems (ECC). Meanwhile, the control of the overall TLS scheme is performed in software by an ARM Cortex-A9 microprocessor. In fact, the implementation of the ECC accelerator core around an ARM microprocessor allows not only the improvement of ECSM execution but also the performance enhancement of the overall cryptosystem. The integration of the ARM processor enables to exploit the possibility of embedded Linux features for high system flexibility. As a result, the proposed ECC accelerator requires limited area, with only 3395 LUTs on the Zynq device used to perform high-speed, 233-bit ECSMs in 413 µs, with a 50 MHz clock. Moreover, the generation of a 384-bit TLS handshake secret key between client and server coordinators requires 67.5 ms on a low cost Zynq 7Z007S device

CloudTree: A Library to Extend Cloud Services for Trees

In this work, we propose a library that enables on a cloud the creation and management of tree data structures from a cloud client. As a proof of concept, we implement a new cloud service CloudTree. With CloudTree, users are able to organize big data into tree data structures of their choice that are physically stored in a cloud. We use caching, prefetching, and aggregation techniques in the design and implementation of CloudTree to enhance performance. We have implemented the services of Binary Search Trees (BST) and Prefix Trees as current members in CloudTree and have benchmarked their performance using the Amazon Cloud. The idea and techniques in the design and implementation of a BST and prefix tree is generic and thus can also be used for other types of trees such as B-tree, and other link-based data structures such as linked lists and graphs. Preliminary experimental results show that CloudTree is useful and efficient for various big data applications

Evaluation of an Internet Document Delivery Service

An Internet-based Document Delivery Service (DDS) has been developed within the framework of the CNR ( the Italian Research National Council) Project BiblioMIME, in order to take advantage of new Internet technologies and promote cooperation among CNR and Italian university libraries. Adopting such technologies changes the traditional organisation of DDS and may drastically reduce costs and delivery times. An information system managing DDS requests and monitoring the temporal evolution of the service has been implemented, running on the local-area network of a test-site library. It aims to track number and types of documents requested and received, user distribution, delivery times and types (surface mail, fax, Internet), to automate repetitive manual procedures and to deal with the various accounting methods used by other libraries. Transmission of documents is carried out by means of an e-mail/Web gateway system supporting document exchange via Internet, which assists receiving libraries in retrieving requested documents. This paper describes the architecture and main design features of the e-mail/Web gateway server (the BiblioMime server). This approach permits librarians to continue using e-mail service to send large documents, while resolving problems that users may encounter when downloading large size files with e-mail agents. The library operator sends the document as an attachment to the destination address; on fly the e-mail server extracts and saves the attachments in a web-server disk file and substitutes them with a new message part that includes an URL pointing to the saved document. The receiver can download these large objects by means of a user-friendly browser. We further discuss the data gathered during the triennium 1998-2000; this consists of about 5,000 DDS transactions per annum with 300 other Italian scientific and bio-medical libraries and commercial document suppliers. Use of the instruments described above allowed us to evaluate the performance of service “before” and “after” the use of Internet Document Delivery and to extract some critical data regarding DDS. Those include: a) libraries with which we have greater numbers of exchanges and their turnaround times; b) extraordinary reduction in costs and delivery times; c) the most frequently requested serial titles (allowing cost-effective decisions on new subscriptions); d) impact on DDS of library participation in consortia which allow user access to greater numbers of online serials

Information needs and access of Members of Vigilante in Adamawa State, North -East Nigeria

ABSTRACT The study investigated the Information needs and access of Members of Vigilante in Adamawa state, North-eastern Nigeria, one of the three states bedeviled by the Boko Haram insurgency. Quantitative research methodology and Cross-sectional survey design was applied for the study. The population of the study comprised of One Thousand Four Hundred Members (1400) drawn from Nineteen (19) local governments areas in the state. Krejcie and Morgan Table (1970) was used to draw (302) members as sample of the population, while Walpole’s (1982) formula for proportions was used in arriving at a sample for each stratum (i.e. each local government area). In collecting data, a total of Three Hundred and Two (302) copies of questionnaires were administered, and Two Hundred and Forty 240 copies (79.47%) were returned and found useful. The data collected was analyzed using descriptive statistics. The outcome of the study revealed that the information needs of members were daily mainly work related and from informal sources, as there were no public libraries/information centers in 17 local governments’ areas of the state. The outcome of the research also revealed barriers to information access to include general lack of formal information infrastructure such as libraries/information centers, poor and unreliable informal information sources, as well as lack of training on information literacy skills for members of Vigilante. It is recommended that there is a need for those involved in vigilante information delivery to continuously examine and identify evolving information needs of members of vigilante in order to meet such needs. Government should resuscitate the dying public libraries in all the local government areas of Adamawa state to provide information services. Libraries should organize training on information literacy and other information use skills for members of vigilante, because if this is done, it will enhance and improve information access across communities in Adamawa state. Finally, information resources be repackaged in order to take care of challenges of proximity to sources of information, language barrier and other challenges faced by members of vigilante