Information Literacy Skills and Awareness of Electronic Information Resources as Influencing Factors of their Use by Postgraduate Students in Two Universities in South-West Nigeria

This work focused on Information literacy skills and awareness of electronic information resources as influencing factors of their use by postgraduate students in two Universities in South-West Nigeria. The need for this study was prompted after observing that most postgraduate students in Nigerian Universities have poor information literacy skills and awareness of electronic information resources which could be due to inadequate end user training, poor search skills, mass irrelevant information, slow internet connectivity, the need to filter the results from the search of information, failure to find information, inaccessibility of some information sources etc. This therefore raises a question of what could be done to assist postgraduate students with these challenges. The population of this study was the postgraduate students of the University of Ibadan, Oyo State and the Lagos State University, Ojo Lagos State. The descriptive survey method was used for this study. Five research questions were used and tested on a sample size of 407 that represented the population of postgraduate students of the University of Ibadan and 117 that represented the population of postgraduate students of the Lagos state University. The data collection instrument that was used for the conduct of this study was the questionnaire. Frequency counts and simple percentages were used to analyze the data. The findings of this study revealed that there was high rate of information literacy skills and awareness of electronic information resources, EIR among the postgraduate students of the University of Ibadan and the Lagos State University to achieve their various academic goals. Power outage was ranked the highest problem encountered by the respondents of the two universities under study in the use of Electronic Information Resources, EIR for their various academic pursuits. Because of the mentioned problems, necessary measures should be taken as recommended by the researcher in the concluding part of this research work