The information behavior of National Science and Technology Library (NSTL) electronic resources users in China has not been researched extensively. This paper aims to help producers and providers collect information on user behavior and develop more electronic resources.
The study investigates NSTL users' behavior from seven “211 projects” universities in Wuhan, a city in central China. The questionnaire includes questions about respondents' basic information (i.e. educational level, discipline, etc.) and their information service requirements. Correlations among users' educational level, academic discipline, retrieval method, and literature use, among other variables, were analyzed.
The results show that most NSTL users are graduate students and young staff members. The number of users who use advanced retrieval and choose the criterion “literature's citation” to judge the literature's value increases slightly with the improvement of the educational level. There is higher demand for literature written in English in the disciplines of natural science, medicine, and engineering, and a certain proportion of demand for materials written in Japanese in the disciplines of medicine and engineering.
The findings suggest that electronic resource producers should offer more foreign literature and that providers should improve the quality of services.
The paper provides suggestions for further improvement of the NSTL to fulfil the information needs and requirements of users.
