Attitude of University Students towards the Use of Institutional Repositories

Abstract

The continuous advancement in ICT leads to the development of institutional repositories (IRs) as tools for managing the institutional information resources in digital format. Attitude is one of the major factors determining the use of institutional repositories (IRs). This study investigated the attitude of university students towards the use of IRs. The study focused on the deployment of IRs as a scholarly communication tool among students in academic environment. The study employed descriptive survey research design. Questionnaire was used to collect data from 500 undergraduate and postgraduate students of Federal University of Technology Akure (FUTA) for the study. Simple random sampling technique was adopted. Descriptive statistics was used to analyse the data with two hypotheses tested at 0.05level of significance. Criterion mean was placed at 2.0. The major findings of the study were: the attitude of university students towards the use of IRs was positive; university students used IRs for assignment; reading of articles and; development of collaborative research. The extent of usage of IRs by university students was high. The result of the hypotheses revealed that there was significant relationship between attitude and use of IRs by students, and there was no significant difference between undergraduate and postgraduate students' use of IRs. The study concluded that the university should update the contents of its IRs in order to encourage the students to improve their attitude the more towards the use of the IRs.