5. Results
The vast majority of the respondents were women (89.7%) and their age
ranged from 23-46 years old. With regard to their use of computers, nearly half
of them (48.3%) claimed to use a computer 2 or 3 times per week. In response
to a question about their computer skills, 67.2% of the respondents perceived
themselves as novice or intermediate users. Respondents were also asked about
their ability to use different electronic resources. The answers demonstrated
that most of graduate students were rather incompetent users of library OPAC,
electronic journals and abstract/index databases, but very skilled at using the
web search engines.
Multiple response analysis was implemented to examine the frequency
tables for multiple response sets. Results showed that the vast majority of
participants (86%) had used search engines (e.g. Google) more than 6 times
during the last three months, followed by full-text electronic journals (33.9%)
and the Library OPAC (29.3%) (Table 1). Half of the respondents were making
use of the electronic resources from their home, whereas only one out of four
(24.5%) were accessing them from the University Library. Most of the
respondents (43.6%) who used any one of the listed resources reported that they
became aware of its existence through friends and colleagues who had already
used it, and only 18.8% through the library.
Kendall’s tau-b was used to examine the association between frequency of
computer use and levels of the use of selected electronic resources. Results
showed that access to and use of computers correlates positively with the use of
OPAC (Kendall’s tau-b = .33), electronic journals (Kendall’s tau-b = .36), Web
of Science (Kendall’s tau-b = .44), ERIC (Kendall’s tau-b = .43) and internet
search engines (Kendall’s tau-b = .27).