Awareness, Importance and Satisfaction with the Library Resources: Survey Results from Pakistan

Abstract

This paper aims at exploring the Master of Philosophy in Education
students’ awareness about various library resources, their importance and
students’ level of satisfaction. This paper concerns the librarians,
research students and academicians involved in guiding student research.
The paper achieves three objectives 1) to understand Master of
Philosophy in Education students’ awareness of documented library
resources 2) explore level of importance given to the documented library
resources and 3) to find out students’ level of satisfaction about the
availability of documented library resources. A conveniently selected
sample comprised 100 Master of Philosophy in Education students from
a public sector university of Punjab, Pakistan. The data were collected in
2012 through a survey questionnaire which was developed by the
researchers and validated by the expert opinions and existing literature.
Forty-four library resources were documented in the questionnaire. The
response rate was 98%. The data were analyzed by using quantitative
approach. It was found that, prior to this survey, the participants were not
aware of 14 documented library resources out of which 6 resources have
been mentioned as very important by the them. As far as the level of
satisfaction about the availability of mentioned resources is concerned, it
was very low. This study has highlighted the need for redefining the role of librarians, functioning of libraries and developing librarian-student
partnership in order to facilitate research students.