ACCESS AND USE OF ELECTRONIC RESOURCES BY THE FACULTY MEMBERS AND RESEARCH SCHOLARS OF SOCIAL SCIENCES IN MAHARSHI DAYANAND UNIVERSITY, ROHTAK, HARYANA

The wide-ranging use of information and communication technologies, especially the World Wide Web, has brought significant changes in the way information is generated, stored and accessed. With the rapid development and use of the internet and web-based tools and technologies the major development that is taking place in libraries is extensive availability and use of various kinds of e-resources such as online database, OPAC, CD-ROM databases, online portals in general or subject wise. Now libraries and information centers spend increasingly more funds for subscribing e-resources, even when shrinking budgets of the libraries. This paper deals with a study on the awareness, accessibility, and use by the faculty members and research scholars of five disciplines of social science of Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak, Haryana. A structured questionnaire was distributed among 500 research scholars and faculty members out of which 30% responded. It was found that more than 3/5th of the research scholars visit Vivekananda library to read books, the largest part of them are aware of the library facilities and are also aware of the availability of e-resources. Indian Citation Index, Web of Science, and Scopus are being used by faculty members and research scholars for citation analysis. Shodhganga and MDU Institutionary repository are being used for Theses and Dissertations. Turnitin software as a plagiarism checker tool is known among the academic community. Majority of the user used UGC-Infonet E-Journal Consortium and JSTOR. 2/5th users (research scholars) preferred hostel as the best location for accessing e-resources, almost half are using e-resources daily, half of them are accessing 2-5 hours a week, more than half of them expressed the advantage is that they can access it from anywhere/anytime, restricted timings in the digital library is the major difficulty expressed by half of them, 39.55% are aware of library orientation program conducted in the library