Availability and utilisation of subscribed databases as correlates of agricultural postgraduate students academic achievement in federal university libraries in North – Central Nigeria; for the Multidisciplinary Academic Conference on Attaining Sustainable Development In 21st Century : African Continent in the fast moving World : New strategies and approaches

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate availability and utilisation of subscribed databases as correlates of agricultural postgraduate students’ academic achievement in federal universities libraries in north- central Nigeria. The study formulated two objectives and some responding research questions as well. It adopted a descriptive survey design and target population of 2463 agricultural postgraduate students from the 4 Federal Universities in North-Central Nigeria offering postgraduate studies in agriculture out of six. Questionnaire was the instrument used for data collection. Three hundred and thirty-five (335) copies of the questionnaires were distributed and three hundred and seventeen (317) copies of questionnaires were returned; representing a return rate of 95%. The data collected were analyzed using Descriptive statistics such as frequency count, mean and standard deviation. The decision rule for research questions one through five was based on whether the mean score value was lower than or equal to and above the criterion mean value of 2.50 for either rejection or acceptance. The findings of the study revealed that the respondents agreed that academic achievement of agricultural postgraduate students are determined by quiz, test, examination performance, seminar presentation, individual and group presentations The evaluation of the availability of subscribed databases is pertinent to the academic achievement of agricultural postgraduate students. It is important for academic libraries to subscribe to scholarly databases. The study recommended that there is need to put in place strategies that will increase the trust in the electronic information resources among the postgraduate students to improve its use. Also, effort should be made to acquire resources from reputable publishers; this will further build the trust in the resources and consequently increase the usage.