academic community

This work was designed to reveal the level of awareness of University freshmen in
library use through the exposition of their previous use ofthe library. The purpose of their
previous use, knowledge of access points and of the general essence of the library was
assessed The purpose was to generate data to equip Library Curriculum Planners ift’·
order to take every freshman into consideration in their planning. A structured questionnaire ‘
was designed and randomly distributed to 1000 new students of the Federal University elf
Technology (FUTO) upon registration with the University Library. Seventeen (17) states
of Nigeria were represented by these students. The results showed that 78.50% of the
students have used a library before coming to the University. Of these, 75.79% used
school libraries, 18.85% public libraries, 2.54% academic libraries, while 0.76% and
1.01 % used National and S~cial Libraries respectively. Out of the 215students that had
not used a library before, 75. 81 %had libraries of some sort in their secondary schools
but they have not used them. From the awareness ofthe organisation of libraries used by
these students had no standard systems of organisation and materials were often not
processed and there were no catalogues and indexes. The work also revealed that library
users had better basic knowledge of the purpose of the library than non-library users.
Based on the findings, it is recommended that school librarians should embark on training
and make effort to ensure that every student is registered in the library. They should
liaise with school authorities through library committees for effective management of the
school libraries. Academic libraries on their own part should review the Library User
Education Programme to accommodate every level of fresh students entering the institution.
Areas for further studies were suggested
Effect of Pre-library use on freshmen in university