Utilization of Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) on scholarly communication process of academics in Sri Lankan universities in the field of Medical Sciences

Abstract

Sri Lankan Universities of this day and age have entered a phase of radical transformation characterized by globalizing with Information and Computer Technologies bringing up new global issues for scholarly communication processes for academics and making traditional 'sciences' into 'cyber science'. However, in this cyber age of ICT, the role of academics should revolutionize towards rapid espousal of them. Especially medical academics, who are at the frontiers of so much new medical technologies and information should be frontward in integrating and best possible utilization of ICT. This study is an attempt made to investigate how far medical academics utilize ICT in terms of specific scholarly activities and in their scholarly communication process. The study is compiled with data from questionnaires supplemented with interviews of 125 medical academics in five universities of Sri Lanka. Final results indicated that the World Wide Web, e-mailing, word processing and presentation packages are the mostly used ICT applications by medical academics. Although ICT has a significant effect on most of the scholarly activities and academics identified it as a stylish facilitator of their work, it did not seem that these academics made optimal utilization of these technologies. The reasons found for this situation are lack of infrastructure facilities, technical knowledge & skills, and helping staff etc. In this study, recommendations are made to improve infrastructure facilities at the university level and to employ university librarians to some extent as IT helping staff for an enhanced utilization of facilities and finally take steps towards an e-world.