P 28 Commercial vs. Open access: use of e-resources among academics of Engineering Facuities of Sri Lanka

Abstract

This study explore the information seeking behavior of academics of engineering faculties of Sri Lanka towards the utilization of electronic resources for their teaching, learning and research needs using commercial e- resources and open access e-resources. The samples were selected on cluster basis from academic staff members of engineering faculties of Ruhuna, Peradeniya and Moratuwa. Structured questionnaire was used to gather data from the sample and telephone conversations, e-mail discussions and interviews with the Librarians were made in due circumstances to verify data from the sample. Web pages of the selected libraries were also examined and reviewed to ascertain the availability of access points/links to e-resources through their homepages. The results indicate that the use of electronic resources among academics is high (97%) and fulfill their information needs through Open Access e-resources (70%) than that of commercial e-resources (29%). They obtain commercial e-resources from personal purchasing (29%), other channels (47%) and from the library (23%). Majority of academics do selfsearching to locate information from the Internet and 94% obtain OA resources through self-searching and only 17% obtain support from the library. The common OA resources have been centered on tools like Google (100%), 'AltaVista' (11%), Excite (2%) and Lycos (11%). It was discovered that 94% of academics search for journal articles, 64% for theses/dissertations, 55% for course materials, 20% for learning objects, 20% for data files, 8% for audio files, 8% for video files, and 29 % for institutional records. The study emphasizes that libraries should encourage to use OA resources and should conduct training and awareness programmes to develop their searching skills to find O A resources from the web. University libraries can launch central purchasing with the help of the UGC in order to provide access to commercial e-resources based on consortia programmes to address the fund restriction issues.