Postgraduate students are relying on the Internet for research purposes
By administering questionnaires to 211 postgraduate students have a preference for one information source over another? Anna Saiti and Georgia Prokopiadou recently sought to examine whether students prefer to use the Internet or their university libraries for learning and research and what factors determine student decisions. By administering questionnaires to 211 post-graduate students from the Greek education system in the 2003-2004 academic year, the authors found 77.3% favored the Internet while the remaining 22.7% chose the library for their primary information source.
Other findings released in their 2008 article "Post-Graduate Students and Learning Environments: Users' Perceptions Regarding the Choice of Information Sources" indicate that students in some fields of study skewed more towards one source than the other. For instance, business/economics and engineering students leaned towards the Internet while education, humanities and social sciences students were more inclined to use the library.
The study highlighted "the provision of creditable and up-to-date information, the ease of access to information at home, the time of day they can obtain material (time resource) and the speed of information retrieval" (Discussion and Conclusion section, para. 1) as the main reasons for students' choices. In light of this, the study offered suggestions for increasing student usage of libraries by extending hours, patterning library hours of operation to suit needs of key library users, offering more orientation sessions for users and employing a customer-service approach. In regards to Internet usage, the authors noted lack of system-specific search skills as an issue and suggested that more instructional programs and research tools could help users sift through the vast amount of information found online.
The authors noted that the study has limitations but that analysis of the collected data can be used as a starting point to further investigate student usage of information sources. 
asaiti@hua.gr
gprokop@primedu.uoa.gr
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