20-24 septembrie 2009 - Biblioteca Metropolitana Bucuresti

Is going digital what users want? Researches on the usage... 443Interpretation of the resultsIn the interpretation of the results we take as a starting point the factthat a great number of the participants in this study who declared they didnot prefer electronic information resources did not indicate any reason forthe rejection of these resources. This makes us believe that there are noreal reasons for this indifference and in fact they don’t really know theseresources, what they are, their content and the advantages they offer, 20%even admitting to the fact that they did not know these resources. Also 83%of them didn’t participate in any of the training sessions that might haveinformed them about these resources, their content and the way in whichthey can be accessed.This lack of user education is another element at the heart of the limitedusage of electronic information resources. Training should be intensifiedand maybe the library should arrange with the teaching staff, possibly theMedical Informatics chair, to instigate one or two compulsory classes in thelibrary taught by the librarians.The author’s view is that the medical education system in Romaniaor more accurately, the way in which the teaching-learning-examinationprocess takes place is another reason for this limited use. A supportingelement to help increase the level of use of electronic resources would be ifthe teaching staff guide, underlines for students the wisdom of consultingthese sources.The situation might be quite different and the results might possiblychange substantially if we included some of the branches of the library inour study. Our suppositions are that there is a category of user that consultsand is interested in electronic resources. These are the residents who workin the clinics where they have access to these resources through the branchlibrary.It is also relevant to note that students can have access to the electronicresources the library makes available for them only in one of the library’sreading rooms or in the library branches. They only have access from homeby special request. If the library could arrange that all users have accessfrom home or any other computer to these resources, then the situationwould greatly improve.It would seem the major reason, in our opinion, for Romanian medicalstudents preferring paper resources is the lack of promotional activitiesfor electronic resources. The results of our research underline the needfor a marketing approach to users when introducing electronic resources.Considering the limited use of electronic information resources it is