A study of constraints in the use of resources and services in scientific and research institute libraries in Iran

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate barriers that would hinder collection development in Scientific and Research Institute (SRI) libraries in Iran. The populations of this study are the research scholars, faculty members and experts belonging to five disciplines from ten institutes in Iran. For the purpose of data collection, a well-structured questionnaire was designed and administrated randomly to the 2,390 faculty, research scholars and expert and 1,550 questionnaires were returned with a response rate of 64.85%. The study reveals that majority of libraries have not adopted collection development techniques. A great majority of the respondents (572; 36.9%) rated their constraints regarding the use of resources and services as ‘Not having updated catalogue’ (Mean=3.20) in ‘Agree’ and more than one fifth the respondents (412; 26.6%) ‘Uncertain’. In order to test whether a number of barriers would hinder the collection development in SRI libraries, this was tested with the help of x2 test. The test conducted for 30 degrees of freedom at the 0.01 level of significance which showed that there are a number of barriers in the collection development (x2 value=274.97, p=0.000<0.05). Hence, the research hypothesis is supported i.e., a number of barriers would hinder the collection development in the libraries under survey.