Effects of Information Literacy Skills on the Use of E-Library Resources among Students of the University of Ilorin, Kwara State, Nigeria

Introduction The library has long been perceived as a building with walls and filled with books for reading. Issa (2003) notes that librarianship as a profession came into existence to preserve and make widely accessible the records of human experience. The emergence of Information Technology (IT) has recreated the face of librarianship. IT has permeated evenly into our daily activities. Okerulu (2003) states that IT has created limitless opportunities for open access to information. Larnikanra (2003) describes the history of the Internet which "grew out of the ARPANET, a computer network developed by the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) in the 1960s. " The term "e-library" refers to information accessed through the Internet. Unlike traditional libraries, e-libraries are not limited by location or time. Libraries have changed with the emergence and application of IT. They have assumed the role of educators, teaching users to find, evaluate, and use information both in the library and over electronic networks. As the use of e-library continues to soar, users are expected to develop information literacy skills. These skills, as Julien (2002) observes, will enable users to make efficient and effective use of information sources. Information literacy is increasingly important. Academic libraries have responded by providing instruction in information literacy, described as "the ability to locate, manage, critically evaluate and use information for problem solving, research and decision making" (Orr, Appleton, and Wallin, 2001). In developing countries like Nigeria however, both IT and the use of the e-library are still at an embryonic stage. The limits of the tradition library and the increasing popularity of IT have caused the use of the e-library to grow rapidly. Although people need no longer go to a building for some kinds of information, they still need help to locate the information they want. Locating information from the e-library requires information literacy. There are standards which an information literate person must meet. The primary goal of this study is to determine how the information literacy skills, especially among students of tertiary institutions, affect the use of e-library among the University of Ilorin students. Literature Review The term "e-library" is used synonymously with "digital library," "universal library", "future library," "virtual library," and "library without walls. " It has been defined variously by different scholars and/or organizations, depending on their perception of the concept. Arms (2005) defines e-library as "managed collection of information, with association, services, where the information is stored in digital formats and accessible over a network. " These two definitions recognize the need for the e-library to function over a network but the crucial part of the latter is that the information is managed. MacCall, Cleveland, and Gibson (1999) define e-library as collections of electronic knowledge resources developed and maintained in order to meet the totality of information needs for a given user population. Like the traditional library, the e-library is also targeted towards a particular group of users in term of its information dissemination. Acting as a "quality guide," e-libraries "often follow certain guidelines for the selection of content in order to maintain a consistent collection of data" (Virtual Library 2007). They follow procedures to select the materials in their collections, to organize and make them available to users. Waters (1998) states that, "digital libraries are organizations that provide the resources, including the specialized staff, to select, structure, offer intellectual access to the Internet, distribute, preserve the integrity of, and ensure the persistence over time of collections of digital works so that they are readily and economically available for use by a defined community or set of communities. …