EXPLORING INFORMATION SERVICES FOR INFOPRENEURSHIP BY POLYTECHNIC LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE GRADUATES IN NIGERIA

Abstract

The decades of unemployment and underemployment situations for librarians and para-professional graduates in Nigeria has become germane for librarianship professionals to look inward and emphatically point to the discipline-based and information-related employment opportunities for library and information graduates to venture into for their entrepreneurial practices, self-employment and tap into those long-term entrepreneurial goals of becoming employers of labour in the information value chain or its spillover web. Four specific research objectives and questions guided this study, relevant literature reviewed, quantitative methods and techniques used which called for the use of descriptive survey design. The population was about 200 HND II graduates of Library and Information Science Department, Federal Polytechnic Offa, Kwara State. The sample was 110. Simple random technique was used to do this. The data gathering instrument used was well-structured and standardized questionnaire. Procedure for administration was face to face and free-floating in the sense that everyone qualified was given questionnaire and not pre-planned. Data gathered were laboriously analyzed manually by the researcher and few assistants using simple average of the Likert. The findings showed that majority of the respondents know the various types of information services in their discipline to a statistically acceptable level, they know their components to an acceptable level but a bit low relative to the first, they can design them to an acceptable level but lower than they could do with just knowing and rendering them. Appropriate recommendations were given, one of them is the need for functional curriculum so that library and information science graduates can use information services to take entrepreneurial advantage of information, knowledge and digital economies.