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TopIntroduction
Recently, the number of students and documents resources increased. Therefore, the academic institutions became obliged to give a great importance to the management of these resources. This study adopted a survey method to have this management and to investigate users and leaders’ information needs.
The Sultan Moulay Slimane University (SMSU)is a Moroccan public higher education institution established in 2006 in Beni Mellal (Beni Mellal – Khenifra region). The University includes more than 20000 students, and 4 institutions:
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Faculty of Letters and Humanities Sciences (FLSH, established in 1987)
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Faculty of Science and Technology (FST, established in 1994)
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Polydisciplinary Faculty (PF, established in 2003-2004)
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Higher Technology School (EST, established in 2012-2013)
The FLSH library (FLSH Beni Mellal, 2015) adopted a proprietary software to manage its documents. The PF and FST institutions used an Open Source Software, namely PMB (PMB service, 2015).
The institutions attached to the University give a great importance to the management of libraries for the following reasons:
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The opening of the new branches;
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The Sultan Moulay Slimane University witnessed an effective increase from 5000 to more than 20000 students over the past four years.
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The university has not yet generalized the integrated library management system in all four institutions.
This study has become very crucial to identify the expectations of decision makers and readers of Sultan Moulay Slimane University libraries.
The main purpose of this paper is to know the students’ information needs and to identify the performance of library services.
This paper is divided into the following sections: The second section describes a literature review of different works. The third section presents methods. The fourth section presents all results by using a frequency analysis, a Pareto diagram, and an automatic classification. Finally, the paper draws some conclusions and recommendations.
TopLiterature Review
The use of this survey has been motivated by the ideas in the works as below:
(Erens, 1996) studied how recent developments of academic libraries effect research. He found that the university library services have been significantly improved in recent decades, and most faculty members were satisfied with e-services and support staff. (Andaleeb & Simmonds, 1998) proposed and tested a five-factor model (Demeanor, competence, resources, responsiveness and tangibles) by using a multiple regression analysis to explain users’ satisfaction with academic libraries. The findings of Andaleeb’s study suggest that library users, especially students, accord significant importance to the demeanor of the library staff and that academic librarians focus on two major elements resources and demeanor.
Some works evaluated the effectiveness of library services basing on the user’s satisfaction. (Cullen, 2001) explored the relationship between service quality and users’ satisfaction by using the evidence based approach. (Mirza & Mahmood, 2012) evaluated the effectiveness of electronic resources and services in Pakistani university libraries by using the survey method for eight university libraries. He used five-point Likert Scale from one (Dissatisfied) to five (Extremely satisfied) to measure the satisfaction level of the respondents.
(Niyonsenga & Bizimana, 1996), adopted two forms, the first form of index based on a simple approach producing a weighted sum of individual values scored for all surveyed items. The second form based on the theory of factor analysis, especially the principal components procedure. He found a correlation between users’ satisfaction and library use and evaluated library activities and services at the libraries of the National University of Rwanda.
(Madhusudhan, 2010) conducted a survey method to highlight the use of e‐resources in research at Kurukshetra University (India) with some constructive suggestions to improve electronic resources and services.