Information Literacy Skills Level and Library Use by Students of Tertiary Institutions in the Buea Municipality, Fako Division of the South West Region of Cameroon

The purpose of this study was to investigate the information literacy skills level and use of library information resources by students of tertiary institutions in the Buea Municipality, Fako Division of the South West Region of Cameroon. The main objective of the study was to determine whether there exists a relationship between information literacy and library resources used by students in these tertiary institutions in the Buea Municipality. A survey research design was used in the study, and a stratified sampling technique was employed to collect data from a sample of 352 respondents from 4 tertiary institutions in the Buea Municipality. The main instrument for data collection was a Likert scale questionnaire, which had some open-ended questions at the end to get in-depth views on difficulties encountered when using library information resources and other ways through which library information resources use could be improved. Data were analysed using SPSS software version 21. Precisely, descriptive statistics was used to analyse data in an attempt to answer the research questions while the Spearman’s two tailed correlation was used to test the hypothesis. The results indicated that there exists a significant positive relationship between information literacy skills level and library information resources used by students of tertiary institutions in the Buea Municipality (?xy =.474; p 0.01). Findings also indicated that there are differences in students’ information literacy skills level between the tertiary institutions involved in the study. Also, findings revealed some difficulties faced by students in using library resources such as lack of skills, lack of books and limited access time. Following these findings, it was recommended that authorities of tertiary institutions should consider partnering with stake holders like the Ministry of Higher Education, to initiate courses in basic library skills in tertiary institutions. Also, library professionals should come up with outreach programmes such as seminars on literacy skills.