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.
