Information needs and information seeking behaviour of library users in the AGRINET

Abstract

A survey was carried out to ascertain information needs and information seeking behavior of the users of libraries participating in the AGRINET. A mailed questionnaire with structured and open-ended questions was used as the research instrument. The results revealed that agricultural scientists in Sri Lanka were actively engaged in research work Teaching/training, management/administration, and extension were the other main functions they performed Their primary areas of research interests were centered on theirf ields of specialization. Plant protection, plant breeding and plant sciences were their main subject specialization. The main purposes of seeking information by agricultural scientists were to support research work in progress and to keep pace with the latest developments in their fields of interests The main current awareness and search techniques used to learn about new publications were literature searching, SDI service, library indexes and acquisition lists of the libraries. Due to lack of facilities to access Internet it was considered as the least important current awareness service. The agricultural scientists in Sri Lanka were heavily dependent on formal sources compared to informal sources. The formal sources such as; periodicals/joumals, abstracting and indexing journals and books are still popular among agricultural scientists as sources of information in all three approaches; to keep up with current developments, for specific search and for comprehensive search The major problem faced by agricultural scientists in seeking information was the inadequacy of information sources in their libraries. Incompleteness of joumals/periodicals, out dateness of books and journals, non-availability of important bibliographic and reference tools was considered major shortcomings of these libraries. The results also revealed that newly introduced information sources such as CD-ROM databases, databases on disk, online databases had been popular among agricultural scientists in the country. Of these three information media, 43.8% of respondents had used CD-ROM databases followed by 22.8%, databases on disk and 13.3%, online databases. The results indicated that the AGRINET services had not been totally used by its users and they were unaware of the important services provided by the AGRINET, the sole network of agricultural libraries in Sri Lanka.