Nigerian university websites: A webometric analysis

Using the AltaVista search engine, data on web links was collected randomly from 1000 selected web pages of 30 Nigerian universities to study the pattern and frequency of outlinks and inlinks. The websites have a total of 44,567 links, representing an average of 45 links per page. Of these, 81.2 % were inlinks from Nigerian university websites to other websites, while 18.8% were outlinks from other websites to Nigerian university websites. The first-generation universities have a higher percentage of links by target web pages (52.6 %) than the others, which returned below 50% of the web pages as target pages. The web pages of Nigerian universities did not target other Nigerian university web pages. Also, the websites seem to link more with non-academic websites than with academic websites. The result shows that that there exists a general low-level of utilization of the Web for sharing and disseminating of information produced by Nigerian universities.