Preservation and Organization of Electronic Resources for Effective Service Delivery in Federal College of Education Libraries in Northern Nigeria

The study investigated the preservation and organization of electronic resources for effective service delivery in Federal College of Education Libraries in Northern Nigeria. The objective is to examine the electronic resources preservation strategies, ICT facilities used for resources preservation,organization of electronic resources and types of electronic resources organized. The research adopted qualitative research methodology. The population of the study is the 12 college librarians and was sampled. Interview was used for data collections, data collected were analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings revealed that, the strategies applied for preservation of resources were migration and normalization. The libraries used external hard drive, drop box/cloud and institutional repository for preserving electronic resources. Majority of the libraries organize their resources. In conclusion, proper management of e-resources is a prerequisite to easy access and use of the resources to enhance research, teaching and learning. The study recommended the use of preservation strategies that can prolong the life span of the resources; organize the resources for easy retrieval; provides access to the resources remotely and lastly, the management of the colleges and their libraries should ensure that all the challenges are minimized in order to provide access for use of the resources

Accessibility and Usage of Scholarly Information Sources by Faculty Members and Postgraduate Students of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria

This study was aimed at developing an understanding of the scholarly information sources and services that faculty members and postgraduate students in Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria accessed and used to support their research, teaching and learning. Three research questions and one hypothesis were formulated and tested with respect to types of Scholarly Information Sources (SIS) available, accessed and used by the Faculty Members (FM) and Postgraduate (PG) Students of Ahmadu Bello University, (A.B.U.), Zaria, Nigeria, in this study. A number of 868 samples comprising 487 FM and 381 PG students were drawn from the population and used as sample size for this study. The data collected, through questionnaire and observations, were analyzed using frequency distribution tables and percentages, while the hypothesis was tested using T-test for independent samples. The results show that academic/research libraries and the internet is the major SIS accessed by the FM and PG students in A.B.U., Zaria. In addition, printed matters as well as manuscripts were the most accessed and utilized Scholarly Information Sources in A.B.U., Zaria. Moreover, there is significant difference between the FM and PG students in their uses of Scholarly Information Sources. This study therefore concludes that internet has revolutionized the process by which information is being packaged, processed, stored and disseminated, as well as how users seek and access information, these notwithstanding, the academic and the research library is still very relevant to faculty members and PG students’ scholarly activities. Therefore, the universities, through their library systems, need to explore the advantages and opportunities offered by the application of Information and communication Technology (ICTs) in scholarly information delivery