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A questionnaire was used to collect data from 1676 undergraduate and postgraduate students randomly selected from three major Nigerian universities to understand how media gratification and constraints motivated their use of text messaging to meet educational needs. Sixty‐five (65 per cent) and 63 per cent of the respondents reported using the technology for contacting peers and lecturers for educational matters while less than 40 per cent have used technology to contact lecturers and others respectively. Generally, closeness to mothers and education of parents influence use of the technology for educational contact. The instrumental gratifications of SMS capability to enable students escape face to face communication, convenience and low cost also explain use of SMS to make educational contact although this activity is constrained by the difficulty to decipher the intention of the messages and by the confusion that often arises due mainly to unclear acronyms.

Understanding learning and information needs of youth could provide planners with information required to address the needs of youth in a community. Using data collected from 220 and 250 male and female youth through Focus Group Discussion (FGD) and a questionnaire survey respectively, this study investigated the information and learning needs of youth in Uzoagba, a rural community in southeastern Nigeria. Two categories of youth could be identified based on their information practices. They are those under 12 where education, health/ HIV/AIDS and income dominate. Another is the group of those above 12 where the issues that dominate their needs are income/employment and education. In summary, youth want to remain healthy to develop their personal efficacy through education and then be usefully integrated into wider social and economic life. Meanwhile, they are concerned about how to participate in generating income to achieve this ultimate aim, and to assist their families and community.

This paper aims to examine the global pattern of growth and development of eHealth research based on publication headcount, and analysis of the characteristics, of the keywords used by authors and indexers to represent their research content during 1945–2019.

This study adopted a bibliometric research design and a quantitative approach. The source of the data was Elsevier’s Scopus database. The search query involved multiple search terms because researchers’ choice of keywords varies very significantly. The search for eHealth research publications was limited to conference papers and research articles published before 2020.

eHealth originated in the late 1990s, but it has become an envelope term for describing much older terms such as telemedicine, and its variants that originated much earlier. The keywords were spread through the 27 Scopus Subject Areas, with medicine (44.04%), engineering (12.84%) and computer science (11.47%) leading, while by Scopus All Science Journal Classification Health Sciences accounted for 55.83% of the keywords. Physical sciences followed with 30.62%. The classifications social sciences and life sciences made only single-digit contributions. eHealth is about meeting health needs, but the work of engineers and computer scientists is very outstanding in achieving this goal.

This study demonstrates that eHealth is an unexplored aspect of health literature and highlights the nature of the accumulated literature in the area. It further demonstrates that eHealth is a multidisciplinary area that is attractive to researchers from all disciplines because of its sensitive focus on health, and therefore requires pooling and integration of human resources and expertise, methods and approaches.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors influencing use of the internet by students of the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and to establish the variation of this use by students' personal characteristics, and as a result to recommend improvements where necessary to the benefit of the student community.

Participants are recruited through a random sampling technique, and data are collected from them using a questionnaire. A one‐way analysis of variance is used for the analysis to uncover the variation of use across demographic and other factors.

It is shown that students who communicate with varies significantly with age, gender and level of study while the various tools they use vary significantly with age, gender, faculty and level of study. Both younger users (<24 years) and older colleagues (>24 years) use chat rooms. Across gender, educational purpose dominates the use of the internet, but it varies with age, level of study and faculty. Higher educational level is associated with less use of the internet for leisure and entertainment. About 73 per cent of the respondents considers internet information as useful while much less than this (44.4 per cent) reported finding internet information as trustworthy.

A major limitation of this paper is that data are collected using only a questionnaire, whereas interview sessions would have uncovered more issues.

Based on this result, this paper suggests discriminated internet education programmes and access by faculty, level of study and gender in order to maximise the use of the internet services by the students in the university.

This study provides useful research information that can guide the university in fine‐tuning its internet projects for optimal benefits of the student community. Other universities in similar situations in Africa as well as elsewhere can also benefit from the findings.

The purpose of this study is to examine the diffusion of ebooks among postgraduate students in arts and technology faculties of the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Electronic books have become increasingly popular in recent years, but factors influencing their adoption and use are not understood in many institutions.

Guided by a sample survey design, data were collected from 1,518 postgraduate students, 438 from the arts and 1,080 from technology, using a questionnaire and an interview schedule.

Students from both faculties used ebooks, identified through serendipitous browsing of the internet, and mainly Google searching. Many of the ebooks they find are not recommended by their lecturers, while those that are recommended are not available free of charge. Students therefore use ebooks mainly to cross-validate and gain extra insights about what they have been taught. There are significant differences between arts and technology students ' use of ebooks with respect to cost, ease of use and other aspects, with technology students having the advantage. There is no programme in the university aimed at harvesting and organising ebook resources for students to access.

The study focused on only one institution.

Institutionalising ebooks could be a useful strategy to address the dearth of current and relevant texts in universities, although ebooks may pose challenges to existing library management processes.

An ebook revolution will cause great changes in information services in libraries – how would university libraries partner to benchmark this evolving practice with respect to questions about standards, technologies, licensing and pricing, particularly in the developing world?

There is no empirical study on this subject matter either in the University used in the study or in any other.

The purpose of this study is to address how media gratification variables and constraints of global system for mobile communications (GSM) technology promote or inhibit use of short messaging services (SMS) for sharing educational information by students in Nigerian universities.

A questionnaire was used to collect data from 1,676 undergraduate and postgraduate students randomly selected from three major Nigerian universities. Data were analysed using factor and regression analyses.

The instrumental gratifications of SMS capability to enable persons to escape face-to-face communication, and its convenience and low cost explain the popularity of the use of SMS to make contact for educational reasons, although this activity is constrained by the difficulty to decipher the intention of the messages and the confusion arising from unclear acronyms used by texters.

Further research might focus on content analysis. What exactly is the information the students share with themselves and others?

The result of this research is critical in the design and deployment of mobile learning technologies in Nigerian universities.

There is no empirical evidence of how students use SMS despite the existence of mobile learning projects in Nigerian universities.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the growth of academic librarians’ research output in Nigeria; it examined their research productivity and determined the authorship pattern and degree of collaboration.

A total of 1,106 articles were retrieved from Current index to Journals in Education and Library, Information Science and Technology Abstract databases for the period 2000-March 2018.

The study revealed that only few authors are productive in the field of Library and Information Science in Nigeria during the period under study. The author productivity pattern is, therefore, in agreement with Lotka’s Law of inverse square. Top journals in which the academic librarians in Nigeria publish their works were identified. Of the 153 recognized universities in Nigeria, the study revealed that only few universities are productive. The years 2011 and 2012 recorded the highest contributions by the academic librarians. The findings also showed a high level of teamwork with most publications being produced jointly.

The limitation of this study is that it only retrieved articles that were indexed by Current index to Journals in Education and Library, Information Science and Technology Abstract. Secondly, articles published by the academic librarians in local journals in Nigeria that are not indexed and not visible are not included in the study.

The findings call for researchers in developing countries to recognize that it is important to publish a substantial number of papers in journals that are indexed and are widely visible.

This study aims to investigate how aspects of mobility affect social media advertising effectiveness (i.e. consumer purchase intention) on mobile platforms from the perspective of the fit-viability model.

Data were collected through an online questionnaire survey of 378 WeChat users and used to test hypotheses with structural equation modeling.

Consumer purchase intention is significantly positively influenced by time flexibility, spatial flexibility, mobile lifestyle and ad relevance. Meanwhile, ambivalence toward ads mediates the relationships of time flexibility and spatial flexibility with purchase intention and moderates the relationships of mobile lifestyle and ad relevance with purchase intention.

The findings offer researchers and practitioners a new angle to understand advertising effectiveness on mobile social media and extend the application of the fit-viability model.

This paper fills the research gap on the role of mobility in social media advertising.

The study examined the personal information management (PIM) challenges encountered by faculty in six universities in Ghana, their information refinding experiences and the perceived role of memory. The study tested the hypothesis that faculty PIM performance will significantly differ when the differences in the influence of personal factors (age, gender and rank) on their memory are considered.

The study was guided by a sample survey design. A questionnaire designed based on themes extracted from earlier interviews was used to collect quantitative data from 235 faculty members from six universities in Ghana. Data analysis was undertaken with a discrete multivariate Generalized Linear Model to investigate how memory intermediates in the relationship between age, gender and rank, and, refinding of stored information.

The paper identified two subfunctions of refinding (Refinding 1 and Refinding 2) associated with self-confidence in information re-finding, and, memory (Memory 1 and Memory 2), associated with the use of complimentary frames to locate previously found and stored information. There were no significant multivariate effects for gender as a stand-alone variable. Males who were aged less than 39 could refind stored information irrespective of the memory class. Older faculty aged 40–49 who possess Memory 1 and senior lecturers who possess Memory 2 performed well in refinding information. There was a statistically significant effect of age and memory; and rank and memory.

This study was limited to faculty in Ghana, whereas the study itself has implications for demographic differences in PIM.

Identifying how memory mediates the role of personal factors in faculty refinding of stored information will be necessary for the efforts to understand and design systems and technologies for enhancing faculty capacity to find/refind stored information.

Understanding how human memory can be augmented by technology is a great PIM strategy, but understanding how human memory and personal factors interplay to affect PIM is more important.

PIM of faculty has been extensively examined in the literature, and limitations of memory has always been identified as a constraint. Human memory has been augmented with technology, although the outcome has been very minimal. This study shows that in addition to technology augmentation, personal factors interplay with human memory to affect PIM. Discrete multivariate Generalized Linear Model applied in this study is an innovative way of addressing the challenges of assimilating statistical methodologies in psychosocial disciplines.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the personal information management (PIM) behaviours of social science faculty in Africa. The study examined the experiences and encounters of selected social scientists in Africa in organising and finding and re-finding of the information they previously created or stored. More specifically, the study sought to examine how faculty keep and refind information, the files and folders in which they store the information. Also, the study examined the nature and characteristics of faculty information spaces with particular respect to electronic documents including emails and paper documents.

Sample survey research design and a mixed methods approach consisting of qualitative and quantitative were used. Data was collected using a discursive technique, an interview schedule and a questionnaire. Data analysis was conducted using factorial analysis of mixed data design, guided by a combination of category and codes identification using NVivo and Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) 17. Principal component analysis (PCA) of factor analysis was executed to identify key components.

Eleven issues, namely, time, infrastructure, importance of the information, folder/file management, document characteristics and organisational context played significant roles in the PIM behaviours of the respondents. Others were importance of the information, document overload, memory, workload and computer literacy. PCA extracted four major components, namely, document overload, time, computer literacy and importance of the information.

An expansion in the number of faculty involved in this study would probably yield a more reliable outcome. Extending the study to cover Africa would also yield a more applicable result.

The key PIM issues identified in this study, namely, document overload, time, computer literacy and importance of the information should constitute the focus of continuous information literacy education aimed at improving PIM social scientists’ faculty in Africa.

Improved PIM of social science faculty will result to improved research productivity and good health.

PIM of social scientists has not been examined in the literature, and yet it is crucial for further understanding their learning and information behaviours, and improving their productivity. The design and administration of a questionnaire constructed based on codes extracted from qualitative and discursive sessions to the same respondents from whom the qualitative data was collected makes the findings very strong. A further deployment of factorial analysis of mixed data design to handle qualitative data makes the contribution of the study very significant.