Authors

• Finnish National Electronic Library (FinELib)

Keywords

educational libraries, electronic resources, higher education institutions, information retrieval, information/library resources, library services, online services, research

Abstract

The survey studied user views on the electronic resources provided by Finnish university of applied sciences libraries. Electronic resources were taken to include, for instance, electronic publications, e-books, online dictionaries and reference databases.

The respondents who carried out research were first asked about their scientific discipline, whether their field of study was a new one, the extent to which there existed a consensus in the discipline regarding important research topics and theory, whether the respondents did research alone or in a group, and to what extent different publication formats (e.g. scholarly monographs, peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals, handbooks) were valued in their field. The extent of using interdisciplinary publications and publications from own discipline was explored.

Next, the respondents were asked about the extent of using e-resources and printed material in general, importance of various FinELib databases and resources, familiarity with and frequency and purpose of using the FinELib resources. Relating to user experience, questions charted the ease of finding material through the FinELib e-resources, opinions on the kind of material that should be included in the resources, problems encountered when using them, training needs, the strengths and weaknesses of FinELib, and general satisfaction with the resources.

Background variables included the respondent's gender, age, university of applied sciences, student or staff group and field of study or research