Impact of Availability of E-Resources on User Satisfaction in Agricultural Libraries of Northern India

The main objectives of the study were to assess the level of user satisfaction with regard to the following types of Electronic Information Resources (EIRs) relevant to agriculture and allied disciplines, viz. Indexing and Abstracting (I&A) Databases; e-Journals; e-Books; and e-Theses. Seven universities were surveyed using a questionnaire for collecting data. The investigator used telephonic and e-mail communication and had a face-to-face interaction with respondents to substantiate the responses and remove ambiguities. The level of users’ satisfaction has been measured using a five point Likert scale. A great majority of respondents are satisfied about the availability of e-abstract databases (87.92%) and e-journals (89.67%). Despite the fact that only three of the surveyed libraries are found to subscribe to a single e-book collection of 600 titles, surprisingly a good percentage of the library users (69.08%) are satisfied with the availability of e-books. Same is the case with e-theses, whereof the majority of respondents (60.33%) are satisfied, despite the fact that only one e-theses database that too only of Indian coverage i.e., KrishiPrabha is made available to users.