Graduate Students'' Information Seeking Behavior : A Case Study of Tamkang University

• Main Authors: Pao-Tsao Lai, 賴寶棗
• Other Authors: Shih-hsion Huang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 1999
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/81910557126568900765

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 教育資料科學學系 === 87 === The purpose of this research is to explore the information needs and information seeking behavior of graduate students. We tried from the graduate students'' points of view to deeply realize the information needs of graduate students, the causes of their information needs, their sources of information, their information channels, the difficulties and solutions which they had when they conducted the information seeking, how they utilized libraries through their information seeking processes and their level of satisfaction to libraries. In this research, we conducted the interview, one of the qualitative research methods, of 60 graduate students of Tamkang University who would be our research samples. The results of the interviews were summarized and analyzed in order to have a better understanding of the information needs and information seeking behavior of these graduate students. There are several major discoveries in our research. (1) There is a very close relationship between the information needs of the graduate students and their majors, the courses they took and the research topics of their thesis. (2) The major information needs of the graduate students'' daily lives belong to entertainment news, computer network techniques, etc. (3) The major causes to produce the information needs of graduate students are coming from their homework and final reports, their thesis, exploring new knowledge and self-improvement. (4) The most necessary information categories are journals, books, master and Ph.D. thesis and the most deficient information categories are also journals, books, master and Ph.D. thesis. (5) The most frequently used languages are Chinese and English. (6) The major information sources of the graduate students are their school library, network resources and other libraries. (7) Most people use online database, network searching engines and online public catalogs of libraries as their major information channels. (8) The major difficulties, which they had when they seek the information, are the non-existence of necessary data, the shortage of library collection and difficulties of finding the original documents. The solutions are to search in other libraries or information centers, to ask exports or professors and to ask the helps from their classmates, senior students or their friends. (9) Most graduate students will go to the libraries at least twice a week in average. To answer the degree of understanding the library services, 40 % of the graduate students chose "understood" and 60 % of them chose "not understood". There are 66% of the graduate students obtaining more than 50% of their necessary information from the library. Half of the graduate students do not think the online public catalog is user friendly. Most students feel satisfied with the overall services of the library. (10) The most frequently used libraries and information centers outside the Tamkang University campus are the National Library, the library of National Taiwan University and the library of National Chengchi University.