Perception of the Faculty Members towards Institutional Digital Repository and the Associated Matters

a study on selected universities of West Bengal

Abstract

Institutional Digital Repository (IDR) is the collective intellectual capital of any institute that provides an incentive to support sustainable models of scholarly communication and shows the intellectual achievement of the Institute. Faculty members are the main content providers of IDR in any institute. This paper analyses the results of a survey among faculty members of five selected universities in West Bengal, keeping in mind various aspects of IDR. These five universities were selected based on the ranking of the top 50 productive Indian universities. 594 responses were received from different departments of these Universities which are
scattered on different campuses. It mainly concentrated on the awareness and willingness to participate in the proposed IDR. More than half of the respondents were aware of IDR and almost two third of the respondents did not want to contribute their pre-published articles to the IDR of the Universities. But for post-published articles, the percentages of unwillingness dropped down by almost one-fifth. It also highlights the perception of the preferred mode of Library access by the faculty members of the selected Universities. Research hypotheses have been formulated and tested based on findings by using the chi-square test. The results were reflected through the survey.