Exploring Undergraduate Library Usage and Resource Search Behaviour: A Case Study at the University of Ruhuna Library.

Abstract

The University of Ruhuna Library system consists of a Main Library at the Wellamadama campus, which serves four faculties, and five other faculty libraries catering to specific disciplines. The study sought to identify the University of Ruhuna undergraduates’ library use reasons and use frequency compared to the Internet use, and how they search for library resources, which have received little or no attention in the literature. The problem has been studied using a scoping survey distributed online. Referring to Krejcie and Morgan's table, a faculty-wise stratified random sample was used to select undergraduates of University of Ruhuna registered at the library system. Data collected from the completed 236 Google forms were downloaded to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet for analysis. Findings revealed that the undergraduates use the library for borrowing and returning of books (148, 63%), reading subject books (165, 70%), preparing for the examination (154, 65%), and reading past exam papers (134, 57%). Findings about how they search information revealed that undergraduate students in each faculty had more interest in the Internet use than the library use; while 99 (42%) undergraduates accessed the internet information resources daily, only 24 (10%) and 7 (3%) undergraduates mentioned that they daily used the library and the library web respectively. However, a higher number of undergraduates mentioned that they come to the library weekly (80, 34%). The findings further revealed that searching the shelves (135, 57%) was more popular than taking library staff support for finding their information needs (99, 42%) or using library catalogue (80, 34%) among the undergraduates. Based on the findings, the study recommends marketing programmes introducing library print resources and online resources, and user education to increase their awareness of the library catalogue and the library web.