Accessibility and use of electronic information resources in Government House Library, Owerri, Imo State

This study examined accessibility and use of electronic information resources (EIRs) in Government House Library, Owerri, Imo State. Four research questions are answered and four hypotheses tested in the study. Survey research design was adopted. The population of the survey is 1,650 staff of Government House Owerri, Imo State. The sample size for this study is 330 library users. Simple random sampling technique was adopted. A rating scale entitled “Accessibility and Use of Electronic Information Resources in Government House Library Imo State (AUEIRGHL)” was used to collect data. The validity of the instrument was done by one specialist in Education Measurement and Evaluation and one in Library and Information Science both in Imo State University, Owerri. The reliability index of 0.80 for the instrument was obtained using Cronbach’s alpha statistics. Mean and standard deviation were used to provide answers to the research questions while t-test statistics was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The findings revealed that the various electronic information resources are accessible to users of Government House Library and the rating of the level of accessibility is significantly above average; the extent of utilization of electronic information resources is high and significantly rated above average; and some of the challenges faced in the utilization of electronic information resources are download delay, lack of search skills, high cost of access, power outages among others and they are significantly rated above average. Based on the findings, the researchers recommend among others, that to meet up with the requirements of this information age, management of such special library should embrace the adoption and use of electronic resources to remain relevance in the process of research; strategies such as using efficient internet service providers to improve use of EIRs by users should be adopted; the government should ensure that there is steady power supply to the library since electronic information resources depend heavily on it.