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The aim of this paper is to investigate whether undergraduate students in the College of Health Sciences in Niger Delta University are information literate, and to determine whether they are aware of and use different information resources including electronic ones, and to assess their ability to evaluate information before use.

Questionnaire and interview methods were used to collect data from the students.

The students mostly rely on textbooks, medical journals, the internet, colleagues, and the Nigerian National University Commission's virtual library for information. They rarely use electronic resources such as MEDLINE, HINARI, the Cochrane Library, and EbscoHost. This could be because of a lack of awareness and skills necessary to search databases. Problems such as lack of time, the challenge of locating “good citable stuff”, inability to use effectively the medical library, and poor skills in information searching were mentioned. The study recommends that medical librarians and faculty should collaborate in integrating information literacy skills into the medical school curriculum.

This paper may help inform discussion about students' competences for locating, selecting, evaluating and using information essential for lifelong learning.

This paper aims to present the results of a study which was carried out to find out whether the undergraduate students in the College of Health Sciences in Delta State University are aware of and fully utilize the medical databases and other online information resources within and outside the medical library.

A questionnaire and interview methods were used to elicit data from the students.

The results revealed that majority of the students are not aware and do not use the online information resources such as: MEDLINE, HINARI, CINAHL databases, NUC virtual library as sources of information to retrieve materials related to medical literature. This could be as a result of lack of training for information literacy skills and ineffective user education programmes in the medical libraries and medical schools to equip the medical students with necessary skills to use the medical databases and other online information resources. Problems such as lack of skills to use the online information resources, lack of time, poor user education programmes, and slowness of server were mentioned by the students as some factors militating against the effective use of online information resources.

The findings will be useful for medical librarians and faculty in highlighting the need to collaborate in integrating information literacy skills into the medical school curricula in developing countries. Paper type Research paper