Avaliação do uso dos livros eletrônicos do acervo da Universidade Federal do Ceará nos cursos de pós-graduação.

Abstract

The twenty-first century came under the great impact of the media revolution and the new electronic and digital information technologies, which led to the introduction of different means of communication, especially in academia, which facilitated the production of and access to information. Since 2009, the Federal University of Ceará had the policy to purchase eBook titles as need to insert academia into this new model of teaching and research practices. Thus, its main University Library has acquired a collection of electronics books on various fields, available to all university community, as an alternative source of information for research, teaching and community services. Observing this fact and knowing the need to evaluate products and services for libraries, this research proposes the following problem: What factors are considered decisive for the use of electronic books, available on the UFC´s library system for graduate students and Professors in all graduate programs? The research methodology works with quantitative and qualitative data, collected through electronic questionnaires, developed and applied through google docs tool. This will allow us to translate the answers into numbers and information, in order to organize them and to facilitate the analysis and suggestions for this new knowledge. This is an exploratory survey with a random sample, with no final conclusive arguments. The method of data analysis is the functionalist, accomplished through study of selected cases showing relevance to the research. To tabulate the data, we used the Microsoft Excel program. As a result, it was observed that teachers have demonstrated more knowledge on the existence of the collection of electronic books purchased and available by UFC than the students. In contrast, students demonstrated knowing more strategies of access than the teachers. As to the importance and satisfaction with this type of collection, students have a better knowledge on the electronic library than teachers. Even being unaware of this collection, students consider it very important. Teachers who don´t know the existence of this type of collection consider it more important than teachers who know it. To the degree of satisfaction, teachers demonstrated to be more satisfied than the students with the eBook collection. It was evident that the factors that contributed to the use of eBooks were: its gratuity at UFC portal, its wide availability and practicality. The factors that contributed to the failure of the use of this feature are: lack of motivation, information not included in the basic bibliographies, lack of a more significant disclosure, need for a tool to access it, and finally, resistance to change, once the public not want to change the pleasure of leafing a printed book to a virtual one.