According to many school of thoughts, simplistically, traditional sources came into being to provide a central location for hard-to-find, scarce, expensive or unique material. Scarcity of information is the platform for the modern library. In countries where information continues to be scarce, a library's function is still voluminous. In some countries where access to information is now based on access to electricity or water, the reason to have storehouses of a subset of all information is harder to articulate.
Traditional sources in such countries can grant access to more information than any user could want or need. Rangathan's rule "for every reader, his or her book," might be now redefined as "for every reader, huge amounts of free-floating content, anywhere, anytime. We now live in the information age where access to many Internet resources is just a few clicks away. The Internet is a technology, which has obtained more popularity in several countries across the world and Nigeria. The social media as a medium of communication and source of information has helped students, researchers, business information finders and information professionals to access information to promote their work and communicate efficiently. Researchers state that in 2012, seventy million American adults logged onto the Internet in a day. Over 95 percent of U.S. public libraries granted Internet access. Students, many faculty, and laypeople turn to online information sources before print or the traditional sources. As a result, library use, mainly for walk-in reference questions and preparation for school and college reports has reduced. For over 10 years, researchers have paid rapt attention to innovations in information sources and their use in the digital era. A study reports that social media are getting more known among all generations of users, including both undergraduates and postgraduates . More than 70% of teens and young adults who go online use at least one social networking site such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. Twitter use has increased from 8% in 2013 to 13% in 2010, whereas blog usage among young adults has declined . While more studies are being done on social media, most of the extant research focuses on the overall trend of social media use or the use of a specific type of social media (e.g., Wikipedia); social networking sites; blogs ; online Q&A community. As social media are gaining popularity, and some of them seem to be playing a vital role as an information source, it is important to understand what kinds of social media are adopted for what purpose, and if they are used as information sources, what users do to evaluate the quality of information provided by such “non-traditional” information sources. It will be necessary to understand how students, in particular, evaluate and use non-library sources such as social media since researchers consistently report that students of various kind prefer electronic resources, especially open Web resources even for their academic assignments; and that they tend to apply criteria other than quality (e.g., accessibility) when selecting information sources. With innovations in technology, more information becomes available to the public through a wide range of channels. Users can access information not only through the traditional, printed sources, but also sources in various formats via the Internet. Research shows that users, especially postgraduates, frequently rely on open resources available on the Web.
Recently, social media whose content is contributed by end-users (e.g., Wikipedia, blogs, YouTube) has become increasingly known as information sources, while the trustworthiness of information from such sources is often questionable and difficult to assess. Understanding what kinds of social media are frequently used as information sources and why and also how users evaluate the quality of information from such sources is important because it can help identify challenges that users encounter when selecting non-traditional social sources to use, and offer guidelines for the source evaluation.
EDITORS SOURCE : Accounting Project Topics
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