ROLE OF ELECTRONIC TEXT-BASED COLLECTIONS WITH MULTIMEDIA CONTENT

ROLE OF ELECTRONIC TEXT-BASED COLLECTIONS WITH MULTIMEDIA CONTENT

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Background of the Study

University e-libraries have made research more interesting and have attained the status of intellectually organized information resource Centre and a world of knowledge at researchers’ fingertips. Adoption of university e-library is a good match towards making researchers, students, faculty members and the university more research driven. The rationale for adoption of e-libraries in universities in Nigeria is solely to provide electronic and online resources for staff and students in order to enhance educational development and provide educational resources for effective teaching, learning and research activities. Electronic library achieves its objectives by creating opportunities for the users to access and retrieve appropriate information that cater for their information needs at their “beck and call”. University e-library is responsible for providing instant access to digitized information, electronic information resources and services with the aid of computer or telecommunication technologies.

Electronic library acquires, processes, stores, evaluates and disseminates information via electronic means to the audience in need of information. It can serve as a medium for achieving national and community development through provision of relevant information necessary for decision making and policy enhancement.  Electronic library is a multi-disciplinary concept that shares various branches of computer science including data management, information retrieval, library science, document management, information systems, the web, image processing, and artificial intelligence. Multidisciplinary nature of electronic library engenders flexibility in the definitions which makes it difficult to have a singular definition of e-library. However, the format, form and nature of digital libraries give clearer picture of what digital library means. 

Electronic library is the library where some or all of the holdings of the library are available in electronic format, and the services of the library are also made available electronically-frequently over the Internet so that users can access them remotely (Onwuchekwa and Jegede, 2011).  According to Hirsh (2014), the mission of e-library is to provide both information services and