Electronic resources access and use for scholarly communication by agricultural lecturers in public universities in Kwara State, Nigeria

This paper examined electronic resources access and use for scholarly communication by agricultural lecturers in two public universities in Kwara State, Nigeria. The study adopted a descriptive survey and used total enumeration technique to capture all the 122 population as a sample for participation. The instrument employed in gathering data for this study was questionnaire that was subjected to face validation and reliability. The instrument was also found to be reliable as the Cronbach alpha method was used to establish its internal consistency which yielded .708. The data were analyzed by applying descriptive statistics using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) Version 23.0. The study found that all the agricultural lecturers in the selected universities extensively used Search Engine to link up electronic resources for scholarly communication; Global System of Mobile Telecommunication (GSM)/Laptop and departmental offices were found to be extensively used as the points from where the agricultural lecturers accessed and used electronic resources for scholarly communication. The study concluded that agricultural lecturers in both universities were not fully utilizing potential electronic library resources for scholarly communication. Agricultural lecturers seldom visited the university library to access and use electronic resources for scholarly communication because of problems they encountered in a few times they had previously visited. These problems were found to be overwhelming and seemed to suggest that the libraries were not ready as an essential part of the academic system to provide necessary psychological boost for agricultural lecturers which were needed to encourage them to visit the libraries in search of more reliable, relevant and authoritative electronic resources for scholarly communication. The study recommended the need by library management to evaluate existing knowledge gaps of the library staff. This is with a view to organizing appropriate training sessions for them so that they can offer assistance to agricultural lecturers on approaches to searching and exploitation of the online information environment.