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The purpose of this study is to identify the digital literacy skills possessed by the students of University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), and the extent to which they use these digital literacy skills in their academic works.

Descriptive survey was adopted for the study, and the population consists of registered students that use the mobile telephone network (MTN) digital library, out of which 10 per cent of the population (281) was sampled for the study. A structured questionnaire was the instrument for data collection. The questionnaire was randomly administered on the respondents who come to use the MTN digital library with particular attention to the different levels of the students. The questionnaire distribution lasted for a week; 281 copies of questionnaire were distributed, out which 184 (65 per cent) responded.

The study showed that some of the students possess digital literacy skills; they use these digital literacy skills daily. Majority of the respondents indicated that digital literacy has affected their academic performance to a high extent. The major challenges of acquiring digital literacy skills include electricity failure, low internet bandwidth, ICT facilities, lack of development of digital literacy programme and standard.

Implication of this study is that the establishment by MTN has enhanced the development of digital literacy in UNN as many students utilize these facilities.

Librarians and library staff should be adequately equipped with digital literacy skills and competencies to empower them to train and educate users, as information and communication technology (ICT) is a major tool for teaching, learning and research. To achieve this goal, there is a need to engage in public private partnership collaboration to sponsor the provision of these ICT facilities in our institutions of higher learning to enhance literacy learning for national development.

The purpose of this paper is to ascertain the management of institutional repository (IR) in Nigerian universities.

The study took the form of a descriptive survey, gathering data from academics and repository mangers from 15 universities that have their IR captured on OpenDOAR.

The results showed that most academics submit their work for archiving in IR, and the types of materials submitted are mostly journal articles and conference proceedings. Contents are archived, using self-archiving and mediated submission. Some universities do not provide support and motivation towards the research works of their staff.

The implication of the study lies in the adoption and implementation of the framework presented in this work to ensure the growth and sustainability of IR.

The study is based on the findings presented a framework to guide repository managers to ensure effective management of IR.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the challenges and opportunities of librarians in federal and state universities in Nigeria in facilitating access to open access resources.

Using a positivist research paradigm, descriptive survey research approach was employed in the study. Five research questions guided the study. The population of the study was 79 librarians. There was no sampling. A questionnaire was used as instrument for data collection, and the data were presented in figures and tables.

The major findings of the study were that librarians are aware of open access resources. They make the resources available/visible to users by linking them to the library website and promote the use of Google and Google Scholar searches. The librarians were of the view that free online resources are important for the research process. The major challenges they face in giving users access to these resources are lack of metrics and evidence to demonstrate the value of free content.

The study only assessed e-resources' librarians in the sampled universities at the time of this study. It may be necessary to assess the perception of users towards open access resources.

Adopting and implementing these opportunities to enhance users' access and use of the resources will improve service delivery without doubt. Though this study is not exhaustive, it has provided insight into the inherent opportunities of using open access resources.

For the library management and librarians, the creation of awareness on available open access resources and facilitating access to users through different strategies will not only increase access but also improve teaching, learning and research. It will also increase users' awareness on accessing other sources apart from through subscription.

Academic libraries’ response to the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic might be an opportunity to reassert and reemphasise their roles in the national disaster management matrix. The purpose of this study is to review the responses of academic libraries in South Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic. The global outbreak of COVID-19 has precipitated a challenge amongst all institutions, communities and libraries as evidenced by the growing lockdowns, deaths and shocking statistics of infections. This has triggered a fundamental need to rethink how libraries can establish innovative ways to continue providing services to users.

This study adopted the interpretive research paradigm to review the situation in South Africa in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The study used an analysis of secondary sources, the activities that took place and personal experience to answer the research questions.

The analysis showed that academic libraries and publishers have risen to the occasion, offering more free content and curating personalised collections so that citizens can have uninterrupted access to content and learning. The digital libraries in South Africa are considered vital alleyways to high-quality e-books, journals and educational content, including open educational resources. Digital library services have enabled academic libraries in South Africa to excel in providing online services, therefore ensuring that learning, research and teaching continued.

This study, using Habermas’s idea of the public sphere as a fundamental theoretical framework, notes that when the physical space is closed, it is necessary for academic libraries in South Africa to make use of the digital space. This study will contribute to the corpus of knowledge relating to South African digital libraries’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study aims to show that digital literacy can serve as a tool for effecting social change and highlights the achievements of an academic library in digital content creation using the Wikipedia platform.

The study adopted qualitative research method, Interview and document analysis were used for data gathering. Data gathered were analysed using content (conceptual) analysis.

Findings showed that the library has created or edited digital content for various categories of women, such as women in academia, industry and politics. These entries have received more than eight million views over a period of two years, which shows that the entries are being utilised. However, the editing exercise had been confronted with challenges such as accessing reliable citations in terms of the notability and verifiability policy of Wikipedia amongst others.

Currently, people rely more on online resources for their research, leaving physical library resources unused. Even, more students start their research online using Wikipedia. Thus, libraries could create visibility for their physical material using regularly visited sites like Wikipedia and its sister projects such as Wikidata; otherwise, these physical materials will remain invisible to the people that needed them.

Contributing to Wikipedia by creating a new entry or editing an existing one can help students to deepen their knowledge about a subject; Wikipedia editing may serve as an avenue for improving information literacy skills. Drawing from the theory of cyberfeminism as used in the study, information and communications technology has the potential to empower women and transform gender relations.

The purpose of this study was to determine the information literacy trends, challenges and opportunities in Nigerian universities, With focus on its characteristics; content and adequacy for students’ information literacy development and lifelong learning. The effort to ensure that university students are empowered to acquire the competences needed for all round education and lifelong learning has been the primary focus of the university curriculum. University regulatory body in Nigeria emphasised the need to provide students with a study plan which provides them with capacity to locate information resources, access, evaluate and use them in legally acceptable manner. The programme is differently captioned with varying contents. With evolving approach to literacy, this study was designed to determine whether the programme has evolved from use of library education to information literacy or still at its traditional mode.

Descriptive survey research method was adopted for the study. The population consists of federal and state university libraries in Nigeria. The characteristics, content and adequacy of the programme as offered in Nigerian universities was the measure to determine the type of literacy. Questionnaire derived from literature and personal experience was designed to elicit information. A copy of the questionnaire was sent to each university that constituted the sample of the study by mail and telephone interviews were given to the heads of the sampled libraries.

It was discovered that majority of the universities studied were yet to consolidate the library literacy programme offered in their universities. Hence, the provision of information literacy content is yet to be realised in Nigerian universities.

There should be constant evaluation and monitoring of the programme by the regulatory bodies to ensure that the programme is reviewed at the appropriate time and that they also abide to the minimum standard.

For the effective implementation of programme to reflect the current development in research and information sourcing, retrieval and use; collaboration in content development as well as teaching between faculty and library; increasing or splitting the programme content to accommodate first year and higher level undergraduates, the regulatory bodies like Librarians’ Registration Council of Nigeria should ensure constant evaluation of the programme.

University intellectual output such as theses and dissertations are valuable resources containing rigorous research results. Library staff who are key players in promoting intellectual output through institutional repositories require skills to promote content visibility, create wider outreach and facilitate easy access and use of these resources. This study aims to determine the skills of library staff to enhance the visibility of intellectual output in federal university libraries in southeast Nigeria.

A survey research design was adopted for the study. The questionnaire was used to obtain responses from library staff on the extent of computer skills and their abilities for digital conversion, metadata creation and preservation of digital content.

Library staff at the university libraries had high skills in basic computer operations. They had moderate skills in digital conversion, preservation and storage. However, they had low skills in metadata creation.

The study has implications for addressing the digital skills and professional expertise of library staff, especially as it concerns metadata creation, digital conversion, preservation and storage. It also has implications for the university management to prioritize the training of their library staff in other to increase the visibility of indigenous resources and university Web ranking.

This study serves as a lens to identify library staff skill gaps in many critical areas that require expertise and stimulate conscious effort toward developing adequate skills for effective digital information provision. It sheds light on the challenges that many Nigerian university libraries face in their pursuit of global visibility and university Web ranking.

This paper aims to provide a bibliometric study of journal articles related to institutional repositories in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) between January 1993 and August 2017. This study will provide researchers with a foundation for further research.

In this study, articles published were analyzed; titles were searched using the term “institutional repositories.” The data were evaluated in response to four research questions on the following topics: publication trends, prolific authors, core journals and times cited.

The results indicate that 124 articles on institutional repositories were authored by 223 individuals. These articles were cited 722 times in 37 journals, and the h-index provided by the Web of Science was 14.

This study only investigated articles titled with institutional repositories in the SSCI. Other items were not included.

This study shows that the implementation of institutional repositories has been limited to library and information science. If they can be used broadly in different disciplines, a better outcome can be expected.

Based on the findings, the growth of institutional repositories as an academic subject is likely to continue. If such discussions can be conducted in other disciplines, institutional repositories may be able to provide a more promising outcome to academia.

This paper is valuable for researchers who wish to examine the trends of institutional repositories in the SSCI and seek possible areas for further research.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the growth of academic librarians’ research output in Nigeria; it examined their research productivity and determined the authorship pattern and degree of collaboration.

A total of 1,106 articles were retrieved from Current index to Journals in Education and Library, Information Science and Technology Abstract databases for the period 2000-March 2018.

The study revealed that only few authors are productive in the field of Library and Information Science in Nigeria during the period under study. The author productivity pattern is, therefore, in agreement with Lotka’s Law of inverse square. Top journals in which the academic librarians in Nigeria publish their works were identified. Of the 153 recognized universities in Nigeria, the study revealed that only few universities are productive. The years 2011 and 2012 recorded the highest contributions by the academic librarians. The findings also showed a high level of teamwork with most publications being produced jointly.

The limitation of this study is that it only retrieved articles that were indexed by Current index to Journals in Education and Library, Information Science and Technology Abstract. Secondly, articles published by the academic librarians in local journals in Nigeria that are not indexed and not visible are not included in the study.

The findings call for researchers in developing countries to recognize that it is important to publish a substantial number of papers in journals that are indexed and are widely visible.