Only librarians use thesauruses, or an inquiry into the use of electronic resources in a research library

Abstract

With the development and quantitative and qualitative growth of information available on-line, the traditional role of the librarian often seems to be disputable. Users do in fact often have the impression that they can find everything, easily and at once on-line, and that they can access final information without any need for mediation. This phenomenon, called "disintermediation", is on the one hand certainly observed favourably by the majority of researchers, but on the other it risks compromising the quality of the results obtained through incorrect or badly focussed research strategies.
Disintermediation has over time deeply modified the behaviour of users in research and in the use of electronic resources. On the one hand this has given them greater familiarity in using a computer and in consulting various information tools (stocks of electronic periodicals, data bases, OPAC, etc.), while on the other it has consolidated some "bad" habits in these activities.
With this in mind, this work proposes an analysis of the use, by researchers of the Higher Institute of Health (ISS), of some electronic resources provided by the Library: a selection of data bases, both bibliographical and full text, in the biomedical sphere, in OVID format; the virtual Newspaper and Periodical library (EV), provided by Caspur (Interuniversity Consortium for supercalculus applications for universities and research), that permits access to an extensive collection of electronic periodicals published by various scientific publishers.
The study is based on an analysis of material regarding the use of electronic periodicals provided by Caspur during the period 2001-2004 and other data regarding the use of data bases during the same period as prepared by OVID. These are compared with the results of a questionnaire proposed by the ISS Library in 2004 on the research habits and strategies of its users.
The aim of the work is to see if and how the advent of electronic periodicals has altered behaviour models in the use of other electronic information resources and to determine their possible impact on the use of libraries.