Usage of E-books in Agricultural Libraries of Northern India

The study has been conducted with a purpose to make an assessment of the usage of a selected set of e-book collections with an objective to work out the similarity or difference in their use across selected states of northern India. An effort has also been made to see whether the users use a single or a combination of e-book collections. Seven sampled universities were surveyed personally by the investigator for collecting data about the questions under investigation. A questionnaire was used as a data collection tool. The investigator also availed of the telephonic and e-mail communication and had a face-to-face interaction with respondents to collect prompt responses, substantiate the responses, and remove ambiguities thereof. Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) was analyze the data on an empirical basis. Chi Squared (χ²) Test has been used to derive association between the variables and test the level of significance. It has been found that only one e-book collection, the ‘CAB e-Books’ is being subscribed and that too by only 42% of the libraries. Thus, the e-book collections has not yet gained popularity among the users of north Indian agricultural libraries, as this e-book collection is found to be used only by 58.33% of users. However, the libraries where the e-books are being subscribed regularly register a comparatively high usage than the ones where it is not as it is found that majority (77.30%) of users therein use e-books on a ‘daily’ basis. Krishikosh, the recently initiated e-book platform in India is fast gaining its popularity. It is also statistically verified that there is a significant association between ‘use of e-book collections’ and the ‘State’ & ‘University’ as two variables; that is, the usage of the e-book collections under study varies quite significantly from state to state and from university to university (p < 0.01).