Gender Implication in Awareness and Use of Search Engines by Private University Lecturers in South-South, Nigeria

IntroductionElectronic information sources can be seen as one of the most recent developments in the fields of information science, librarianship and information technology. Electronic information sources are becoming more and more important for the academic community in the 21st century (Kumar and Kumar, 2008). Electronic resources are now used more often that print resources by university lecturers owing to the nature of their job which is primarily information dependent. Globally, university education thrives on adequate access to information resources for teaching, learning and research. This is the reason why the library forms an integral part of the educational system with the primary responsibility of providing information resources to lecturers, students, staff and researchers in their respective institutions. There is no doubt therefore why university lecturers make extensive use of Information resources for effective teaching and research. In this way, the need for adoption of information and communication technology in university libraries cannot be underestimated. As a matter of fact, the Internet is now considered a key resource and asset in every university library.According to Grillon (1994) the Internet has changed the format of information storage and retrieval. It has also transformed the jobs and functions performed by all and sundry. Today, the Internet has further transformed the world into a knowledge economy. The knowledge economy is an economy where knowledge is the key raw material and source of value for development (Grillon, 1994). Thulasi (1999) identified knowledge resources to include databases, data sets, books & references, organizations, conferences, courseware/tutorials/guides, manuals, discussion groups, electronic journals, patents, preprints, projects, news, software, standards, technical reports, theses and dissertations, abstracting and indexing databases (bibliographic databases), citation databases, digital collections (images, audio, video), equipment/ product catalogues, scientific data sets (numeric, property, structural databases), library catalogues (including union catalogues), museum and archives, virtual libraries, books, reference sources (dictionaries, encyclopedias, biographies, handbooks, abbreviations, thesauri), maps etc.The tools for accessing Internet information are different from those used to access library materials. Catalogues, bibliographies, indexes, abstracts, shelf lists, accession registers are used to access materials in the library, while search engines and directories are used to search the Internet.A search engine is defined by Microsoft Encarta Dictionary (2008) as a computer program that searches for specific words and returns a list of documents in which they were found, especially a commercial Internet service. According to Williams and Sawyer (2007) a search engine is a search tool that allows one to find specific documents through keyword searches and menu choices, in contrast to directories, which are lists of websites classified by topic. Aina (2004) viewed keyword as a combination of few words or phrases that represent what the information seeker is looking for; giving enough information about each document that will enable a user to retrieve the desired document when needed. Some popular search engines and their web addresses include: All The Web (http://www.alltheweb.com/), AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com/), Excite (http://www.excite.com/), Google (http://www.google.com/), Hotbot (http://www.hotbot.com/), Lycos (http://www.lycos.com/), MSN Search (http://search.msn.com/), Teoma (http://teoma.com/), WiseNut (http://www.wisenut.com/), Yahoo! (http://search.yahoo.com/). Through the utilization of search engines, lecturers would be able to retrieve relevant resources from online journals and e-books stored in diverse Internet sources and databases. Some of the sources for online journals and e-books include the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) (www. …