Research Students Encounter with Information Seeking Process for Academic Purposes

This paper investigates the various barriers that university students' encounter in efforts to seek information for academic purposes. It focuses on skills deployed by these students to overcome this lack. University students from four different fields of study are sampled to address their research-information seeking processes and needs in their daily academic life. The needs are matched to strategies applied that suggest coping mechanisms of fulfilling the demands of the course taken. This research analyses these barriers and coping mechanisms as a means of enhancing students' research-information seeking skills. Findings show that the main barrier towards information seeking processes among university students is due to limited network and Internet access. Students need to have strong Internet access to obtain the information, as the web resources and online databases provided by the library play an important role in helping them to meet their information needs.