Abstract

The extent to which electronic resources are utilised by undergraduate students will depend largely on some factors pertaining to the users, especially computer literacy and subject background. Therefore, the study investigated the influence of computer literacy and subject background on the use of electronic resources by undergraduate students in two universities in South- western Nigeria. The survey research design was adopted in the study with the questionnaire as a major instrument for data collection. Simple random sampling and purposive sampling techniques were adopted to select three faculties and two departments each from the universities and 275 respondents out of 904 undergraduate students. Simple descriptive statistics was used to analyse the data. Results of the study revealed that 8(7.1%) of the respondents at the Federal University of Technology Akure (FUTA) and 30(19.0%) at the Obafemi Awolowo University Ile-Ife (OAU) visit the library to consult electronic resources. Although electronic resources in general are very important for academic tasks, 30(26.8%) of the respondents at FUTA and 32(20.3%) at OAU indicated that the Internet is most useful in discovering literature relevant to their subject background. Computer literacy and subject background influenced use of electronic information resources by the students. The study, therefore, recommended that measures should be taken to increase the level of computer literacy among the students for increased use of electronic resources available in the university libraries.

Key words:  Computer literacy, electronic resources, university libraries.