A Study on the use of Digital Libraries for Searching Academic Information, by Lectures and Students of Sri Lankan Universities

Abstract

The main purpose of this research is to find out the problems and issues that university lecturers and undergraduates face when they are searching information by using digital libraries. All the lecturers & undergraduates of university of Kelaniya has been considered as the research population and a sample was selected among lecturers of Faculty of Social Sciences & Humanity and the undergraduates of the bachelor of art (BA) special degree programmer of the same faculty. The main data collection instrument used was questionnaire method and primary data were collected through distributing questionnaires. Secondary data were collected through the printed sources which was considered relevant to the research. As result of researching the academic information it was revealed that the most of the lecturers and undergraduates of the two faculties were not using digital libraries, compared to faculty of Humanity the lecturers and undergraduates of Faculty of Social Sciences are highly depended on using digital libraries and in that they preferred more foreign digital libraries. The lecturers and undergraduates of the two faculties give more priority to searching academic information in using digital libraries. It was also revealed that they use those information for their research activities. The main problem behind the usage of digital libraries by lecturers and undergraduates was the lack of understanding about that concept of digital libraries. Some of the solutions proposed based on findings were by awareness seminars and workshops to share knowledge about digital libraries and its contents, workshops to socialize by the responsible persons in the library field to solve many of the problems successfully which were identified through the study.