Working Experience and Librarians' Knowledge of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in Nigerian University Libraries

This paper discuses the influence of librarians' years of working experience and sources of acquisition of ICTs' knowledge and skills. The study is based on 169 librarians working in thirteen university libraries in the universities of six states located in the South-South zone of Nigeria. The purpose of the paper is to find out if years of working experience has an effect on librarians' sources/means of acquisition of ICT knowledge and skills. The questionnaires used were answered by two categories of librarians. Those with longer years of experience – 16 years and above and those with fewer years of working experience. It was concluded that librarians with fewer years of working experience explore means of acquiring ICTs knowledge and skills more than librarians with more years of working experience. It was recommended that librarians with longer years of working experience develop more interest in sources through which they can acquire ICT knowledge and skills.

Information and Communication Technologies for Educational Development: The Case of Cybercafés at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria

This study examines the use of Cybercafés/Internet resources and the evaluation of their usefulness. About eight Cybercafés located in the university community were used in this study. Questionnaires, interviews with the Cybercafé owners, staff and users as well as personal observations made during inspection of these cafés were used in this study. The data were analysed according to the background of the Internet users. The richness and high speed, accuracy, and authority were used by users to judge the quality of the Internet. Information such as the establishment of the café's facilities, membership and the future of the Cybercafés were also looked into. Finally, one can clearly see that the dominating impact of digital technology has crossed the Rubicon of controversy. The result of the survey shows that forty percent of the users learnt to use the internet by self instruction, thirty five percent learnt from colleagues or friends. Those in the sciences use the internet the most, the channel mostly used in obtaining information is the search engines. A large number of students, faculties and researchers make use of the internet in obtaining information. Many of those of those users make use of the Cybercafés in the university community.

Information Acceptance and ICT Resistance: Promoting the Role of Information in Rural Community Development

Rural community development is a major issue for developing countries. Much attention has been given Information and Communication Technology (ICT) projects to connect rural communities with the global network. However, ICT resistance is a deterring factor in addressing the digital divide in developing countries. It is postulated that reversing the resistance to to ICT can be strategizedthrough "information acceptance." ICT can be accepted by rural communities by creating demand for information. The paper calls for the refocusing on the role of information in rural community development and ICT as a tool for change agent. Initiatives for rural community development must emphasize the importance of information in rural communities.

A New Cryptographic Scheme for Securing Dynamic Conferences in Data Networks

Dynamic conferencing refers to a scenario wherein any subset of users in a universe of users form a conference for sharing confidential information among themselves. The key distribution (KD) problem in dynamic conferencing is to compute a shared secret key for such a dynamically formed conference. In literature, the KD schemes for dynamic conferencing either are computationally unscalable or require communication among users, which is undesirable. The extended symmetric polynomial based dynamic conferencing scheme (ESPDCS) is one such KD scheme which has a high computational complexity that is universe size dependent. In this paper we present an enhancement to the ESPDCS scheme to develop a KD scheme called universe-independent SPDCS (UI-SPDCS) such that its complexity is independent of the universe size. However, the UI-SPDCS scheme does not scale with the conference size. We propose a relatively scalable KD scheme termed as DH-SPDCS that uses the UI-SPDCS scheme and the tree-based group Diffie- Hellman (TGDH) key exchange protocol. The proposed DH-SPDCS scheme provides a configurable trade-off between computation and communication complexity of the scheme.

Effective Communication and Smooth Administration of Academic Libraries in the 21st Century: a New Paradigm in Nigeria

Effective communication is the soul of any institution. New opportunities are presented by Information and Communication Technology (ICTS). Library managers must adopt a more critical and communication plan that will enhance their skills and allow for further training, as well as allowing stakeholders to have input into decision-making.