Mercy Emmanuel Ugbe, Emmanuel Bekorfema Ugbe & Aniah Bernard Beshigim
Abstract
The study adopted survey design to investigate students’ characteristics and their information seeking behaviours in the University of Calabar. It was guided by two research questions and two hypotheses. The population of the study was 3,312 registered users of University of Calabar library in the 2019/2020 academic session. A sample of 200 respondents drawn through accidental sampling technique was used. The data were collected using a structured questionnaire constructed by the researchers tagged “Students’ Information Seeking Behaviours Questionnaire” (SISBQ). The instrument was subjected to face validity. One-way analysis of variance was used to analyse the data, and the hypotheses were tested at .05 level of significance. The results indicated, among others, that students’ internet background knowledge, and their academic discipline have significant influence on their information seeking behaviours. Based on the findings, it was recommended, among others, that the University administration should organize training and retraining programmes for academic staff who will encourage students to use different channels of information seeking, and these channels should be made available to them.