Abstract:

University of Bahrain provides over 41 e-scholarly databases to its users through its library to support teaching, research and development. The problem here how to retrieve needed information from the above e-scholarly databases as users should have certain skills and follow certain steps and as the training sessions provided by UOBL according to the demands (personal or departmental). This experimental and descriptive study intend to focus in particular on the enhancement of the skills required to query formulation and search strategies through certain scenario the researcher introduce, using two e- scholarly database systems from Elsevier and EBSCO (Sciencedirect, Business source complete),and highlight the usage and type of training sessions, services and guidance given to the users by the library specialists to deal with them. Two questionnaires were distributed using type of Google application tool (on-line Google form) one pre-lab training session given and the second one post-lab training, to improve search skills while using e-scholarly databases and encourage use. It is found that although search results are significantly better through using structured rather than unstructured or simple searching, utilizing more complex searching operators may not worth the effort as its more likely for users to employ them incorrectly. It is also found that a large number of respondents are using field searching and Boolean operators to access information from e- scholarly databases.

Keywords:

Information retrieval, Query formulation, e-resources, information seeking, training.