An Assessment of the Level of Accessibility and Use of Indexes and Abstracts among the Undergraduate Students of the University of Ibadan

Abstract

Experience has shown that many undergraduate students of the University of Ibadan consult information materials such as books and journals for their daily educational activities and research purposes. However, the process of searching and retrieving the much-needed information is strenuous and sometime may be futile. This could be either that undergraduate students have no access to information retrieval materials such as indexes and abstracts or they are not aware of their usefulness. The advent of the Internet further made the use of indexes and abstracts unpopular among students. Therefore, this work is set to find out the level of accessibility and use of indexes and abstracts by undergraduate students of the University of Ibadan. From the study, it was found that most of the undergraduate students of the University of Ibadan are fully aware that indexes and abstracts are important to their academic progress. However, some of them did not know what information retrieval tools are and their importance. It was therefore recommended, among others, that undergraduate students should be properly introduced to indexes and abstracts as well as how to use them through the orientation programmes of university  libraries, faculties and departments. The use of indexes and abstracts should be incorporated into the curricula of universities so that its techniques will be applied by the undergraduate students in the use of these retrieval tools.