Availability and Awareness of Virtual Referencing Services in Selected Academic Libraries in Niger State.

Abstract

This paper examined perceived quality as a determinant of e-book usage among postgraduate students in southwest universities in Nigeria. The descriptive survey design was adopted and the instrument for data collection was questionnaire. Content-related approach validation was conducted to ensure the validity of the instrument while Cronbach alpha was used to test the reliability of the instrument. The population of the study comprised postgraduate students from the University of Ibadan (11,825), Ekiti State University (1,620), and Bowen University (55) respectively. The sample size was 390. The objective of the study was to determine the perception of quality of e-books among postgraduate students in universities in Southwest, Nigeria. There is no significant relationship between qualities of e-books and e-books usage among postgraduates’ students in the Southwest universities in Nigeria hypothesis was tested at 0.05 level of significance. The simple random sampling technique was adopted in selecting the three universities. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics. The hypotheses were tested using linear regression. Findings revealed that postgraduate students have a positive perception of the quality of e-books. The study concluded that there was a significant relationship between perceived quality and the extent of e-book usage. The study recommended that; the government should allocate budget for both federal and state-owned universities to subscribe to the appropriate e-book website for the benefit of staff, students, and academic researchers for research. Also, libraries should constitute e-librarian team that will be receiving, answering queries and exchanging e-books with the e-users via university webpage among others.