Abstract

Author(s): Showket Ahmad Lone, Abid Hussain Mir, Shabir Ahmad Ganie

The present paper deals with the information seeking behaviour of Research scholars of Faculty of social science, University of Kashmir. The overall purpose of the study was to determine about their information requirements and also to determine their awareness of library services available to them. The paper also discusses knowledge and use of electronic sources, problems in finding information and satisfaction of research scholars for library resources and services. A well structured questionnaire was distributed among the research-scholars for data collections. Descriptive statistical measures such as percentages and frequency distribution were employed for data analysis. The findings of the survey reveal useful facts about the Information Seeking Behaviour of research scholars. The survey indicated that the majority of scholars adopt different search strategies. There are a number of scholars who use different tools to keep ourselves up-to-date using services like CAS and SDI.. 64.1% scholars preferred web sources over documentary sources. 67.1% of scholar’s access libraries subscribed journals while 32.8% scholars access journal articles through personal subscription. When we look at the awareness of research scholars, it was found that 83.5% of scholars are aware of the various services provided by the library. The scholars do, face a number of problems in their information-seeking activities. It is found that the top ranking problem mentioned by majority (46.2%) of the scholars is that the information is scattered in too many sources. While the other problems which the scholars often face are very expensive information sources and lack of technical support.