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The family, as the most basic social institution, serves as the bedrock of any society. Family structures worldwide have undergone various changes in their forms, nature, and functioning, including Abia state, Nigeria. The Nigeria Civil war is one of the symbolic events attributable to changes in the Abia family structure. Changes in the family structure could influence conjugal relationships. The study explored the dynamism and changes in the family structure and conjugal relationships at different eras of the family life cycle in Abia society. A qualitative research method was used in this study. Twenty-two participants (4 life history and 18 in-depth interview participants) were recruited in this study with purposive sampling techniques. Using an archival checklist, life histories, and an in-depth guide, information was elicited on family structure and conjugal relationships. The study was subjected to thematic analysis. The findings revealed dynamism and changes in family structure, with polygyny being most prevalent prior to the civil war, the emergence of step-parent and single-parent families during the civil war, and monogamy being most prevalent, with increasing single-parent and step-parent families contemporaneously. The conjugal relationship shifted from having concubines (acceptable and practised covertly) to having side chicks (been practised covertly). The Nigerian civil war had an impact on the observed dynamics in family structure during the civil war and immediate post-civil war. Other factors such as religion, education, civilization, and migration, among others, influenced the contemporary Abia family structure. Understanding family structure dynamics could be useful in solving issues regarding family and conjugal trajectories.

Previous studies have shown that knowledge management (KM) plays a role in service innovation or that there is a positive relationship between them. However, this role or relationship is yet to be established quantitatively through empirical evidence within the context of university libraries in Nigeria. The purpose of this study is to determine how knowledge management affects innovative services in university libraries in Nigeria.

The study adopted a quantitative approach and used questionnaire to collect data from 250 librarians who participated in the study. A structural equation modeling approach was used to validate the research model.

It was found that KM affected service innovation positively. The three measures of KM cycle, namely, knowledge capture/creation, knowledge sharing/transfer and knowledge application/use were found to have positive and significant effect on service innovation in university libraries in Nigeria. In conclusion, university libraries in Nigeria with high activities in knowledge capture, knowledge sharing and knowledge use are more likely to provide innovative services to their users.

The study suggests that libraries with high level of activities in knowledge capturing, sharing and application are more likely to engage in innovative services. The study is also capable of encouraging students to take courses on KM and library and information science educators to place more emphasis on KM in their curricular.

The paper offers a unique empirical direction for service innovation in university libraries in Nigeria. As there is a dearth of quantitative empirical evidence in the area of service innovation in libraries, the empirical evidence obtained in this paper will not only contribute to the body of knowledge in this area but also be used to create an environment for innovative library services.

Digital technologies have become significant as organisations, including financial institutions, attempt to adopt enhanced and more efficient approach for service provisions to customers. Despite the obvious shift to digitalised methods of service delivery, some financial institutions argued that though digitisation may increase financial efficiency and profitability, it also poses new risks and potential threats with significantly unanticipated side effects, especially, with respect to employment. Against this background, this study examined how the following cashless policy instruments: Mobile banking, Automated Teller Machine (ATM) and Point of Sale (POS) Terminal, influence financial transactions in Lagos, Nigeria; using Zenith Bank PLC as a case study. Structured Questionnaire was administered to 100 Zenith bank customers. The study applied the logit regression method and findings showed that 54% respondents use mobile banking daily, 39% respondents use ATM daily, 25% respondents use POS daily. On an overall scale, mobile banking is widely used and mostly preferred. Also, results showed that while POS has a significant relationship with financial transactions, Mobile banking, and ATM both have an insignificant relationship. Results from the study encourage the management of CBN to create more awareness of these instruments, and likely increase the number of these instruments.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the current status of electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) projects in Nigerian university libraries.

A survey research methodology was applied. A total of 125 questionnaires were distributed to librarians in eight government‐funded universities in South Eastern Nigeria.

Only three out of the eight universities surveyed have started ETD projects in their libraries. Other universities have the intention of adopting ETD but very little has been done towards this. The study also revealed that university libraries in Nigeria stand to benefit immensely from ETD projects. Some of these benefits as revealed from the findings include enhancing scholarly communication in Nigeria, promoting the global visibility of Nigerian universities, and enhancing research dissemination. The results of the study also revealed some challenges of ETD in Nigeria. Strategies to mitigate these challenges were also identified from the findings.

The paper establishes that the adoption of ETD in Nigerian university libraries is very low. Nigerian universities must therefore adopt a pragmatic approach to develop an ETD program that will facilitate the dissemination of research documented in theses and dissertations.

The originality of the work lies in the empirical evidence obtained from the eight university libraries surveyed.

This paper aims to analyze the relationships between discourse leading indicators and citations from perspectives of integrating altmetrics indicators and tries to provide references for comprehending the quantitative indicators of scientific communication in the era of open science, constructing the evaluation indicator system of the discourse leading for academic journals and then improving the discourse leading of academic journals.

Based on the theory of communication and the new pattern of scientific communication, this paper explores the formation process of academic journals' discourse leading. This paper obtains 874,119 citations and 6,378,843 altmetrics indicators data from 65 international multidisciplinary academic journals. The relationships between indicators of discourse leading (altmetrics) and citations are studied by using descriptive statistical analysis, correlation analysis, principal component analysis, negative binomial regression analysis and marginal effects analysis. Meanwhile, the connotation and essential characteristics of the indicators, the strength and influence of the relationships are further analyzed and explored. It is proposed that academic journals' discourse leading is composed of news discourse leading, social media discourse leading, peer review discourse leading, encyclopedic discourse leading, video discourse leading and policy discourse leading.

It is discovered that the 15 altmetrics indicators data have a low degree of centralization to the center and a high degree of polarization dispersion overall; their distribution patterns do not follow the normal distributions, and their distributions have the characteristics of long-tailed right-peaked curves. Overall, 15 indicators show positive correlations and wide gaps exist in the number of mentions and coverage. The academic journals' discourse leading significantly affects total cites. When altmetrics indicators of international mainstream academic and social media platforms are used to explore the connotation and characteristics of academic journals' discourse leading, the influence or contribution of social media discourse, news discourse, video discourse, policy discourse, peer review discourse and encyclopedia discourse on the citations decreases in turn.

This study is innovative from the academic journal level to analyze the deep relationships between altmetrics indicators and citations from the perspective of correlation. First, this paper explores the formation process of academic journals' discourse leading. Second, this paper integrates altmetrics indicators to study the correlation between discourse leading indicators and citations. This study will help to enrich and improve basic theoretical issues and indicators’ composition, provide theoretical support for the construction of the discourse leading evaluation system for academic journals and provide ideas for the evaluation practice activities.

The use of the internet and World Wide Web to source information is now an emerging practice in developing countries and seems to be obscuring the use of printed resources in libraries. This paper aims to investigate the impacts of internet services on the use of prints in academic libraries in Nigeria.

The design of the study was ex post facto. The population of the study was the 131,670 students registered in the library from 2005 to 2014 academic sessions. The instruments for data collection were documentary records, oral interviews and observations. Statistics of past physical transactions at the Nnamdi Azikiwe Libraries University of Nigeria, Nsukka, were consulted and adapted for the study. Tables, graphs and a benchmark for assessment guided the analysis and discussion of the data.

Readers’ registrations, average daily readership and consultation of theses/dissertations were among the physical services that are multiplying and exerting pressures on existing facilities in the library. Books and periodicals consulted were constantly declining since the advent of internet services. Academic libraries in Nigeria should be adequately funded to sustain information and communication technology (ICT) backbone for internet usage and better marketing and stabilization of library services to retain users in academic libraries.

Increased availability of full-text online could force academic libraries in developing countries to cancel much of their online subscriptions. Serious efforts must be embarked by academic libraries to bring back the users to the library.

This article is the first to investigate the impacts of internet usage on printed resources in academic libraries in Nigeria. The originality lies in its contribution to internet use on information resources in academic libraries in developing regions.

Digital preservation of theses and dissertations (TDs) is crucial for the archiving (long-term preservation) of intellectual content of undergraduate and postgraduate students in universities. This paper aims to investigate the digitization of TDs in three selected academic libraries in Oyo State, south-west Nigeria.

Descriptive survey research design was used for this study. The instrument for data collection was the questionnaire. The study comprised 78 professionals and paraprofessional librarians in the three selected university libraries in Oyo State.

The study revealed that digital preservation of TDs in university libraries is at the developmental stage. Also, the study revealed that most participants strongly agreed that the main purpose for embarking on the digital preservation of TDs was to influence the web ranking of the institutions. Web archiving was the widely adopted method of digital preservation in university libraries. Poor information and communication technology infrastructure, absence of policy and poor funding were identified as major challenges militating against the effective digital preservation of theses in the libraries. Hence, it was recommended that the management of university libraries should be more committed to providing substantial funds to meet the financial obligation for digital preservation initiatives.

The study provides insight into a case study of digitization of theses and dissertation i academic libraries in three selected universities to serve as a basis for further research.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether open accessibility of medical journals published in Africa may influence journals’ citation impact.

An evaluative informetric research approach was used to compare 134 health and medical (H&M) journals hosted in the African Journals Online (AJOL) database. Harzing’s Publish or Perish (PoP) software was used to extract the following publication and citation data from Google Scholar: citation counts, number of papers and the h-index of the journals. Three null hypotheses were formulated to guide the study.

A total of 65 open access (OA) and 69 non-OA H&M journals of African origin were found in AJOL. Only 20 African countries have journals hosted in AJOL, with more than 53% of them from Nigeria and 13.4% from South Africa. Findings reveal that non-OA H&M journals performed poorly in terms of citations compared with their OA counterparts. The t-test analysis revealed high significant difference in the citations and research impacts of OA and non-OA H&M journals published in Africa.

The study will assist in collection development in medical and health libraries globally and in Africa particularly. The study will also be a useful guide to journal publishers, health researchers and health workers providing information on where to publish and the journals to subscribe.

Apart from adding to the body of knowledge in scholarly communication in Africa, this study will go a long way in influencing policies in H&M research in Africa.

AJOL is the only online database hosting journals from all countries in Africa. Unfortunately, the quality and research impact of the journals in the database have not been adequately investigated. The paper adopted an informetric approach to evaluate H&M journals in Africa so as to provide wider insight on the contents and quality of the journals hosted in it.

The purpose of this study is to assess the value of altmetrics or other indicators, showcasing the impact of academic output, which is seen too often correlated with the citation count.

This study considered three reputed journals of Library and Information Science (LIS) published by Elsevier. A total of 1,164 articles were found in these journals from 2016 to 2020 and the relationships between altmetric attention scores (AAS) and citations were examined. The analysis was extended to compare the grouped data set based on percentile ranks of AAS like top 50%, top 25%, top 10% and top 1%.

Using Spearman correlation analysis, the findings reveal a positive correlation between AAS and citations with different significant levels for all articles, and articles with AAS, as well as for normalized AAS in the top 50%, top 25%, top 10% and top 1% data set. For the three journals International Journal of Information Management (IJIM), Journal of Informetrics (JIF) and Library and Information Science Research (LISR), a significant positive correlation is observed across all data sets. But an unexpected result was observed: in the case of the top 50% of articles for the IJIM and JIF showed no significant correlation but the LISR journal showed a positive correlation for the whole data set. This journal though has fewer articles in comparison to the other two.

A source item that is highly cited may not be having high social media attention as reflected in the findings. This demarcates AAS with citations implying various factors on which these measurements are dependent. The study distinguishes these metrics lucidly. There is not a single guideline or uniformity in assessing the correlation found. But the problem is that the interpretation of the correlation strength affects the conclusion of the study. Moreover, this study will be a role model as a draft for librarians to select relevant journals for their libraries and will facilitate authors in the choice of the publication outlets for their papers, particularly concerning the journals that have both visibility and research impact.

The study reported devising a comprehensive tool to validate AAS as a measure of scholarly impact to include appropriate social media sources and verify its relationship with other metrics. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to discover the correlation between AAS and citations for the highly impactful LIS journal published by Elsevier. The empirical evidence lies in the citation and altmetric data extracted from the dimension database.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and validate the competencies perceived to be essential for library and information science (LIS) professionals keeping in view the needs of knowledge management (KM) applications in Indian academic libraries.

After reviewing relevant literature on the topic, a list of 25 competencies was prepared and organized in five categories. A link for attending the survey (list of KM competency statements) for the validation of competencies was sent via electronic mail to the teachers (95 in numbers) of 65 LIS schools where post‐graduate courses in LIS were offered. Respondents were asked to nominate the level of importance for validation of each proposed KM competency.

Findings of the study show a minor difference in the mean scores of five categories of competencies, but all the competencies were validated as needed. However, respondents were of the opinion that development of competencies in the field of management by LIS professionals is the most essential requirement for effective application of KM in Indian academic libraries.

Competencies validated by the respondents may be used as the groundwork for evaluation of current LIS educational programmes and revision of LIS curricula to impart a wide range of competencies to LIS students for working in KM environment.

Since no empirical study on required competencies for KM in India has been carried out before, this study closes this gap and provides guidelines to modify existing LIS curricula or LIS educational programmes to impart skills and competencies as validated by the academic community.