Academics' attitudes towards use of electronic journals: A case study of Punjab and Chandigarh

The article examines academics attitude towards e-journal use. A well structured questionnaire was designed to elicit the opinions of the users. Responses were gathered from 542 faculty members of five universities. The results of the study showed that the characteristics that affect the choice of e-format over print in order of preference are ‘faster access’, ‘available from desktop’, ‘convenience’, ‘remote access’, ‘timeliness’, ‘available at all times’, ‘hyperlinks’, ‘multi-user access’, ‘currency of information’, ‘inclusion of audio–video material’, ‘interactivity’ and ‘animation of graphics’. The characteristics that affect the choice of print format over electronic in order of priority are ‘physical comfort’, ‘portability’, ‘ability to underline’, ‘familiarity with format’ and ‘ability to browse’. A majority of the teachers use e-journals for ‘research’, ‘teaching’, ‘writing reports’, ‘current awareness’, ‘background research’ and ‘internal/external presentations’. The problems faced in accessing e-journals are ‘access difficulties’, ‘discomfort of reading from computer screen’, ‘lack of IT knowledge/skill’, ‘information overload’ etc. A majority of the teachers want future e-journals to have features such as ‘full text index of every article’, ‘searching capability across a wide range of journal articles’, ‘searching capability within an article, display relationship between a wide range of works’ and ‘links to multimedia files’, etc. On the basis of the findings, some suggestions are made for maximizing the use of e-journals.