Postgraduate Agriculture Students’ Awareness of E-Resources: A Study

Abstract

Tracing modern users’ awareness of various disciplines’ electronic resources (E-resources) is a must for the Library and Information Science (LIS) researchers so that the modern librarians can fulfil the expectations of the users. To meet their requirements, conducting a study such as this is an essential thing in the LIS field. The present study focuses on the Annamalai University Postgraduate Agriculture discipline users’ E-resources awareness across their branches namely Entomology, Agronomy, Agri-Extension, Horticulture, Plant Pathology, Agri-Business and Bio-Technology. The data were collected during the year 2016. The targeted agricultural E-resources are CABI's (Centre for Agricultural Bioscience International) database, AGROVOC (Controlled vocabulary), AGRIS (International System for Agricultural Science and Technology), AgDB (Agriculture related Databases Directory) and AGRICOLA (Agricultural Online Access). This study also encompasses the said users’ library visit behaviours too. Of course, to analyse the library visit attitudes is one of the major objectives in LIS research. So, an attempt has been made to slice the data in order to trace the respondents’ library visit behaviours along with the users’ awareness of E-resources. Inferences have been drawn with the support of enough statistical evidences with more caution. Results would help the librarians/decision makers to get a narrowed down vision while designing their acquisition policies concerning to the Eresources that fall in Agriculture discipline. The formulated research questions are: (1) Do agriculture users significantly differ in their E-resources awareness? (2) Do agriculture users significantly differ in their awareness level group comparisons?