Information Search Pattern of Doctoral Students in the Electronic Environment: An Investigation among the Science Doctoral Students in Bharathiar University, Coimbatore

The coming of the world wide web has propelled vigorous growth of the electronic forms of communication which simply does not fit into the traditional publishing format. The introduction of digital information resources on e-resources has revolutionised the academic world. The Internet is paving way for a great leap in the field of higher education and research. The growth rate in usage of electronic information resources is sufficiently high and if this trend continues for few more years, a time may come when the print versions will get ‘totally eclipsed’. This paper is an attempt to investigate the use of electronic information resources by the academic community of the Bharathiar University, Coimbatore. For this purpose a survey was carried out using questionnaire tool. The findings indicated that 84.31% of the respondents are 21–30 age group. The results shows that 51.96% of respondents access electronic information resources everyday. The study reveals that most of the respondents use of electronic information resources through e-journals. The paper highlighted the various problems and issues involved in handling electronic information resources and has given suggestions to improve the library services to meet the demands of the users.