Access and use of electronic resources by academics and postgraduate students at the University of Venda, South Africa

Abstract

Electronic resources (e-resources) have brought many benefits and challenges in the way people access, retrieve and store information. At the University of Venda (UNIVEN), e-resources are there to be accessed and used by the whole university community which is composed of undergraduate and postgraduate students, academics (lecturers) and support staff. In order to provide relevant services to academics and students, academic libraries need to know the extent of e-resources usage, preferences, attitudes, perceptions, usage patterns and challenges faced by their communities in using e-resources. These aspects have not been systematically investigated at UNIVEN. Furthermore, it was not clear whether the available e-resources at UNIVEN were utilised effectively and whether UNIVEN has prerequisite infrastructure and technology required to access e-resources. This study investigates the use of e-resources by academics and postgraduate students at the University of Venda (UNIVEN), South Africa. The specific objectives of this study were to determine the purpose of using e-resources by academics and postgraduate students at UNIVEN; to establish perceptions of academics and postgraduate students towards access and use of e-resources; and to identify challenges faced by academics and postgraduate students in accessing and using e-resources at UNIVEN. This quantitative study used survey research design to investigate access and use of e-resources by academics and postgraduate students at UNIVEN. A stratified sampling was used to select 45 academics and 150 postgraduate students. Questionnaires were used to collect data from the respondents. The collected data were analysed using Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and Statistical Package for Social Sciences software (SPSS). The findings of this study revealed that both academics and postgraduate students accessed and used the available e-resources. The findings showed that age and gender had no significant relationship with access and use of e-resources. The academics and postgraduate students used e-resources for academic purposes and they all had positive perceptions towards e-resources. Accessing and using e-resources while off-campus was a major challenge faced by academics and students. The study recommends that UNIVEN should provide additional computers for accessing internet by students and increase its internet bandwidth. The university library should ensure that librarians responsible for training on the use of e-resources have adequate skills and should raise awareness of the available e-resources training programmes. In addition, the study recommends that UNIVEN library should modernise its Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) and provide a single-point of search which will allow simultaneous searching of multiple resources including print and e-resources to eliminate the need for searching the various databases separately.