Perceived Effect of Library User Education on Students’ Library Patronage in Universities in Benue State, Nigeria

The study investigated the perceived effect of user education on students’ library patronage in universities in Benue State, Nigeria. The study looked at the Perceived influence of library orientation and bibliographic instruction on students’ library patronage. Two research questions guided the study while two hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. The study adopted a survey research design. The population for the study comprises 3400 library registered second year student users in the three universities in Benue State for the 2016/2017 session. The sample size for the study was 358 students who were selected using simple random sampling technique. The instrument employed for data collection was a self-constructed structured questionnaire titled “Perceived Effect of Library User Education on Students’ Library Patronage Questionnaire†(PELUESLPQ) which was validated by experts. The reliability of the questionnaire was established using Cronbach Alpha method and a reliability coefficient of 0.80 was obtained. Data was collected and analyzed using Means and Standard Deviation to answer the research questions and Chi-Square statistic to test the hypotheses at 0.05level of significance. The findings of the study revealed that, Library Orientation and Bibliographic Instruction have significant perceived effect on students’ library patronage in the universities in Benue State. The study concluded that the user education programmes taught in the universities in Benue State have greatly impacted students’ library patronage. Recommendations were made that, User education programmes should be made compulsory in universities since it equips students’ with necessary skills in the use of library and efforts should be made to encourage students’ attendance to user education lectures since the programme has been found to enable students to be self-reliant in the use of library