Engagement of users with e-resources across agricultural libraries of Northern India

The purpose of this paper is to identify the frequency at which the users of agricultural libraries of Northern India tend to use the e-resources and explore the time they invest on average in a day in using e-resources. An effort has also been made to examine the state wise, university wise and user category wise tendency w.r.t. the frequency at which they use e-resources and the average time in a day they spend on their use.

A survey was adopted to conduct the study and a questionnaire was used as a data collection tool. The investigator also interacted with the librarians through telephone and also resorted to the e-mail communication to substantiate the responses and seek certain clarifications thereof. Statistical Package for Social Science was used to analyse the data on an empirical basis. χ² test was used to derive an association between the variables and test the level of significance thereof.

It is found that the users of North Indian agricultural libraries have got a great tendency to use e-resources as majority of them are seen to use them “daily” and “2-3 times a week”. They prove to be voracious, prudent and sensible users in the sense that they spend 2 hrs in a day, 1 hr in a day and even 3 hrs in a day on usage of e-resources and thus go at par with the use pattern recorded in other domains of knowledge across India. No remarkable difference is witnessed among different categories of users w.r.t. frequency of use and the time spend on use of e-resources.

This study has been conducted on e-resources only. Response to a similar set of questions need to be collected from the same library users to consolidate the facts about the print form of information and thus carryout a comparative study.

This is first work of its nature in Northern India with domain as agricultural libraries. The outcome of the study will enable the librarians to judiciously decide about the proportion at which the two formats of information resources need to be acquired and the facilities the libraries need to create for adequate, smooth and reliable access to two formats of information.