ABSTRACT

With the mission to providing services to users, the university library is established for the purpose of acquiring, processing, preserving and making information materials available to the community it is serving. These resources are sourced based on the disciplines or courses offered by the parent institution in order to meet the information needs of the users of the library. With increasing demand by users, university libraries are developing different avenues in the fulfilment of their goals and objectives. For library to achieve its purpose, it should provide services and information resources required to meet the information needs of its patrons which will contribute to educational, social, political, economic and cultural development of the society. For several decades, libraries have generally explored alternative ways of providing responsive library services to their internal and diverse users (Bani, 2001). However, due to continuous increase in users' demand for information, coupled with dwindling library budgets, university libraries can no longer develop a large and comprehensive collection of information resources. For the same reason, these universities are unable to provide services that will satisfy the needs of its patrons. This is the situation in Nigeria and other under-developed countries. The inconsistency in funding of Nigerian university libraries (NULs) shows that the government is not sensitive to the information needs of the society. The alternative to this problem of underfunding is to explore other means of generating the funds needed to provide quality information resources and satisfactory services to users.