Commercial vs. Open access: use of e-resources among academics of Engineering Faculties of Sri Lanka

Engineering Faculties of Sri Lanka are quite rich with IT facilities and e-culture where a lot of students and academics use the network environment for their scholarly activities. Some faculties have introduced online courses, online tutorials and submission and evaluation of assignments online. The purpose of this article was to explore the information seeking behavior of academics of engineering faculties of Sri Lanka toward the use of electronic resources for their teaching, learning and research needs. The investigation was made to identify the extent of using commercial e- resources and open access e-resources to fulfill their information needs. The methodology occupied in this study was the sample survey, where the samples were selected on cluster basis from academic staff members of engineering faculties of University of Ruhuna, University of Peradeniya and University of Moratuwa. Structured questionnaire was used to gather data from the sample and telephone conversations, e-mail discussions and interviews with the Librarians were made in due circumstances to verify data from the sample. Web pages of the selected libraries were also examined and reviewed in order to ascertain the availability of access points/links to e-resources through their homepages. The results indicate that use electronic resources among academics is high and engineering academics fulfill their information needs mostly though Open Access e-resources than commercial e-resources because access to commercial e-resources is costly and access facilities are limited in the country. Academics obtain commercial e-resources mostly from personal purchasing or from other channels than from the library. Libraries have been unable to provide satisfactory amount of e-resources due to restrictions of funds. It seems that engineering academic poorly use the resources provided under programmes like INASP. Majority of engineering academics do self-searching to locate information from the Internet. Yet, the use of searching mechanisms and tools has been centered on a particular set of popular tools