Management of Electronic Resources by Cataloguers in Nigerian Federal University Libraries

Library has been a collection of information materials for ages and print media have been the bulk of the library resources. However the advent of information technology in the early 1990s led to the emergence and continuous exponential growth of digitally or electronically borne information resources. (Parker, 2007). Other factors such as provision of space economy; ease of access through numerous metadata, search engines, online catalogues, O.P.A.Cs, and protocols; access which is not hindered by distance or boundaries and simultaneous consultation of the same e- resources by many users, provided the pre-eminence of e-resources over print format. Electronic resources include CD-ROMs, e-journals, e-text or electronic books, locally loaded databases, websites and abstracting and indexing databases such as MEDLINE. According to Bothmann and Holmberg (2010), " e-resources also include products that aid in resource access for patrons such as A-Z lists, Open URL, servers, Federated search engines and resources that provide full- text content such as publishers' electronic journal content, journal content platforms such as Project Muse or Jstor and content aggregators such as EBSCOHOST's Academic Search Premier and proxy servers or other authentication tools" (Bothmann and Holmberg, 2010: 4) An e-resource can also be " a package of e-journals or a database of abstracts and indexes that include the full text of some or all articles referenced by the indexes" ( Sadeh and Ellingsen, 2005: 04) For e-resources, the interface through which it is offered should be considered because these elements are intricately linked, even though they can be licensed separately. In addition, among e-journals package, published by a publisher, a specific journal could be governed by a different set of license terms. (Sadeh and Ellingsen, 2005).. Other factors that are specific to e-resources and do not apply to the traditional print include patron authentication, access, administration, usage