Competitive Intelligence and Entrepreneurship Skills as Correlates in Marketing Library Services among Academic Librarians in Lagos State Public Universities in Nigeria

Abstract This paper investigates entrepreneurship skills and competitive intelligence as correlates of marketing library services among academic librarians in Lagos State public universities, Nigeria. The library has modernised its services by engaging entrepreneurship skills in order to promote service delivery that will be effective in this technological era. The study adopts a descriptive research design with the use of a self-structured questionnaire as an instrument for data collection. The sample size for the study was 63, and 52 copies of the questionnaire designed for this were retrieved and found useful for the study; hence return rate is 82%. This study revealed that entrepreneurship skills possessed by information professionals in Lagos State are printing information resources, publishing, and bindery and photocopying with a mean value of 3.67. The study further established that Competitive Intelligence (CI) strategies utilised by information professionals in Lagos State libraries were on delivering products and services, with a mean of 3.19 CI strategies demonstrating positive contributions to the institution’s mission, objectives, and goals. The study recommends that librarians and information professionals should endeavour to engage in research on how to acquire relevant CI on promoting the profession and to enable them to contribute meaningfully to the development of their organisation. The study also recommend that librarians and information professionals should increase their entrepreneurial skills to establish more services that can be of benefit to the users and parent institution. These can also serve as revenue generation to the institution such as establishing a publishing firm, information broker unit in the library.