ABSTRACT

The study was carried out to examine the undergraduates’ use of electronic information resources (EIRs) in public and private university libraries in South-South, Nigeria. The study was guided by five research questions and four null hypotheses formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance. The study adopted comparative research design, the population of the study was 8,563 comprising 2,524 undergraduates’ in three private universities and 6,039 undergraduates’ in three public universities in South-South, Nigeria. The sample of this study was 428 comprising 302 undergraduate students in public universities and 126 undergraduate students in private universities. The instrument for data collection was researcher designed questionnaire titled “Undergraduates’ Use of Electronic Information Resources Questionnaire (UUEIRQ)”. The instrument was face validated by three lecturers. The reliability of the instrument was 0.79 which was determined using Cronbach Alpha statistic. The data were collected through the administration of 428 copies of the questionnaire to respondents and 405 copies were retrieved completely filled and used for data analyses representing 95% rate of returns which include: 284 public and 121 private university students. The research questions were answered using frequency count, percentages, mean and standard deviation and the null hypotheses were tested using the t-test statistic. The result of the data analyses revealed that: EIRs were not used in public but used private university libraries. The undergraduate students’ were highly aware of EIRs in public and private university libraries. Undergraduate students to a high extent access EIRs in private university libraries and low extent in public university libraries. The undergraduate students to a high extent utilized EIRs in private university libraries and to a low extent in public university libraries. The challenges of the use of EIRs among undergraduate students in public and private university libraries include: unfriendly user interface, inadequate electronic information gadgets, slow internet network connectivity among others. From the findings, it was recommended therefore that: Since electronic information resources was not adequately used in public universities there is need for public university libraries library management in South-South Zone to check the causes of student poor utilization of  electronic information resources while private universities university library management should keep on enhancing students used of electronic information resources.