Adoption of electronic reference materials in academic libraries of Iran

Abstract

Libraries have experienced a great deal of change in communication networks and information technology. The Iranian academic libraries, like other libraries, attempted to adopt the new information technology. It should be realized that although new information technologies and electronic resources are collected on a large scale by academic libraries they are not always used in the same scale. There are some factors, which affect the rate of adoption of each new technology. Rogers in his theory introduced these factors in five categories as relative advantage, observability, trial- ability, complexity and compatibility. This paper investigates the effects of different features of electronic reference materials on the rate of their adoption. Results show that the most effective factors in adoption of electronic reference materials are the ability of electronic reference materials to facilitate information retrieval, shortening the time of searching and fair cost of resources. In addition, it seems that the most problematic factors, which slow down the adoption of electronic reference materials, stem from unfamiliarity of academic librarians and users with computers and searching of databases.