Recent Trends in Electronic Information Resources Usage: Among Scientists, Engineers and Technologists - A Comprehensive Literature Review

With the exponential growth of telecommunication and network technologies, today’s Scientists, Engineers and Technologists largely depend upon ‘Electronic Information Resources’(EIS) in their day to day scientific work. The coming of EIS has led to a significant transformation by which scholarly information is disseminated across the globe. This has greatly affected the way a scientist or an engineer seeks this information, acquires it and uses it effectively. ‘User Studies’ took off as early as 1940 in the area of Library and Information Science and is still one of the most researched areas. The success of any information system lies in understanding its user as he happens to be an integral part of it. ‘User Studies’ assumes all the more importance amongst these Scientists, Engineers and Technologists in this information explosion age. This radical shift in scholarly research has dramatically changed the role of the librarian in this modern electronic era to cater to the information seeking behaviour and needs of the user. This comprehensive literature revw.highlights the recent trends in EIS usage amongst this ‘niche’ community with some specific studies on aerospace engineers