A study on consortium to access e-journals to meet the information needs of the academics in Sri Lankan universities

Abstract

The libraries in Sri Lanka, like in most developing countries suffer from inadequate funding and/ or stringent budget cuts. This has affected the level of services offered to both in terms of quality of collection and the degree of staff support provided. In such a situation only a few libraries can afford to have a wide range of information resources within their budget. To minimize such situations they formulated the Library Consortia, with the aim of sharing available resources with other member libraries. This study is an attempt to investigate how far the consortia can provide access to e-journals to satisfy needs of academics in Sri Lankan universities. This study was focused only on Science and Engineering faculties. It was revealed that 75% of the university librarians have accepted e-journal consortia, as a useful effort for the information needs of their universities and 31.3% of them have affirmed that this great effort of e-journal consortia is an essential to overcome the budgetary problems of the universities regarding journal acquisition. The special feature of the study revealed were all most all the (97.63%) university academics were interested in more specific as well as subject related information through the consortia as online databases in the future than present. Therefore the recommendations should be directed to the academic's requirements in e-journal acquisition.