ICT Literacy among the Staff of Selected Ghanaian and Nigerian University Libraries

Abstract

This paper reported the survey that was conducted to ascertain the ICT literacy level among the professionals, paraprofessionals and other members of staff of two Anglophone West African university libraries – Ghana and Nigeria. Five Ghana university libraries and seventeen Nigerian university libraries were sampled. The twenty-two universities are all from English-speaking West African countries. Each of the institutions involved in this research was used as a contact for the distribution and collection of the questionnaires from the individual respondents of the twenty-two universities sampled both in Ghana and Nigeria. The information supplied by the respondents were used to analyze the staff situation and the number of computer literate and non-literate staff in their respective libraries. The data analysis revealed that about two hundred and fifty eight (258) professional librarians work in the university libraries surveyed. Two hundred and one (201) paraprofessionals also work in those libraries, while the other members of staff constitute the largest working force of about seven hundred and thirty six (736) staff. The result of this study reveals that out of about 258 professional librarians, 229 of them were ICT literate while the remaining 29 professional librarians were ICT non-literate. This constitutes an overall percentage of 88.76% for the literate professionals as against 11.24% for ICT non-literate professionals. Also, out of 201 paraprofessionals, 150 of them were ICT literate while the remaining 61 were ICT non-literate. This also constitutes 74.63% for the literate paraprofessionals as against 25.37% for ICT non-literate paraprofessionals. Other staff totaled 736. 625 of them were ICT literate while the remaining 111 were ICT non-literate. This also constitutes 84.9% for the literate other members of staff’ as against 15.1% for ICT non-literate other members of staff. Tables were used to illustrate these in order to ease understanding. The findings of this study shows that there has been remarkable improvement in the ICT literacy level of Nigerian university libraries when compared with the previous studies reported by the leading author in the recent past.