Use of electronic resources among research scholars and faculty members of university of Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, India: A survey

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ICT has brought the revolutionary changes in the functioning of libraries and information centres. The impact of ICT including WWW and Internet is visible in every walk of life. The libraries are not the exception. Due to electronic publishing, many e-resources in the form of e-journals, e-books and online/off-line databases are being published. The academic libraries especially colleges and universities libraries have been procuring these resources for their libraries. Due to escalation in the cost of learning resources both printed and e-resources and financial problems the academic libraries are facing, the consortia models are being adopted and experimented for the procurement and access to e-resources by the colleges and universities. The first part of paper introduces the eresources, and its procurement under consortia models successfully implemented by INFLIBNET Centre since 2003. Under the UGC-INFONET Programme about 179 university libraries have been given access to e-resources which comprises of e-journals and online databases. The second part of the paper describes the use of e-resources by the research scholars and teachers of Allahabad University. In order to ascertain the usage of the journals by the research scholars and teachers of Allahabad University, the present study has been conceived to find out the use of e-resources which have been given access to the research scholars and teachers in the university campus mainly at Central Library and Departmental Libraries. To what extent the available e-resources are being utilized by the library users and what are their awareness level, usage pattern, preference of the publishers/journals etc. For this study survey method has been used using questionnaire as a data collection tool. This study has been carried out during January, 2015 to June, 2015. This is a preliminary pilot study conducted on smaller sample to ascertain the validity of the questionnaire. The simple random sampling technique has been adopted for the study. The findings of the study reveals that the library users belonging to younger generation have adopted the Internet, online/offline electronic resources or web resources very quickly and at the same time the elderly library users are not comfortable using Internet, social media and e-resources. They rely more on the traditional printed resources. In order to make the optimum use of the e-resources available for the university library users through consortia, extensive and frequent user's awareness programmes needs to be organised by the library in collaboration with INFLIBNET and other agencies.