A Study Of The Evaluation Of The Usage Of Academic Library Electronic Resources

With the development of modern information technology, electronic resources have become a major part of the academic library collection. In order to renew electronic resources,determine the cost-benefit return of electronic collection,and provide the scientific foundation for collection development decisions, libraries should pay more attention to the evaluation of the usage of electronic resources. Based on related evaluation theories, such as the cost-benefit analysis, outcomes assessment, usability evaluation and consumer satisfaction index, the study adopts both quantitative and qualitative methods to evaluate both specific electronic resources (such as electronic journals, full-text databases and so on) and the whole library electronic resources. As far as specific electronic resources are concerned, the study recommends statistics and measures about the usage and cost; establishes usability evaluation indexes based on users. Furthermore, a questionnaire survey is conducted to measure the usability of ABI/INFORM and BSP of Sun Yat-sen University Library. It demonstrates that usability evaluation can reflect the problems of electronic resources from users'perspective, which provides the grounds for academic library to renew electronic resources, and helps vendors to improve the performances of electronic resources. When it comes to the whole library electronic resources, the study proposes a user satisfaction-based model which is applied to test the users'satisfaction of Sun Yat-sen University Library. The model is modified after using correlate analysis and regression analysis to estimate whether the four determinants have relevance to and impacts on user value and user satisfaction. The recommendations are given to improve the electronic collection development of Sun Yat-sen University Library based on four-quadrant analysis. In the end, some suggestions are put forward for the practice of the measures for the usage of academic library electronic resources. 27 diagrams, 26 tables and 5 appendices are included.