User Education and Staff Attitude as Correlates of Information Resources Use by Students in Colleges of Education: A Case Study

Abstract

The study aimed at examining user education and staff attitudes as correlates of information resource use by students in colleges of education: a case study. Four research questions were asked and three hypotheses were tested in this study. The study adopted the descriptive survey research design. The population of the study was 8,131 respondents drawn from the four colleges of education in Delta State. The sample size for this study was 436 respondents and the cluster sampling and the simple random sampling techniques were used in selecting 405 students and 31 librarians from the four colleges of education in Delta State. The instrument used for data collection was the questionnaire. The data collected were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The findings from the study indicated that user education progreammes and staff attitude does not jointly significantly predict use of library resources by students in colleges of education in Delta State. The study showed that the level of use of information resources by students in colleges of education libraries in Delta State was high. The study, therefore, concluded that user education and staff attitude are important variables which can influence the use of library resources by students. Based on the findings, the researcher recommended that librarians should focus on training library users to be independent users as this will help curb to a great extent, the challenges encountered by library users in the use of library materials.