COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT IN UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES IN THE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT

Digital environment, a demanding concept, goes beyond a policy of acquiring materials such as policies on housing, preservation, storage, weeding, and discards of stock. Electronic resource, any product that delivers collection of data be it in text, numerical, graphical, or time based, as commercially available resource and a kind of documents in digital formats, that are made available to library users through a computer based information retrieval system. It has several constraints and reasons. In this study attempt has been made to know whether “ICT affects Budgeting” and “Reason for using digital collection”. Out of 520 questionnaires distributed among the LIS professionals working in University Libraries 389 responded and the response rate works out to 74.80%. This study further analysis sufficiency of the sample and reliability of the data thus collected. These 389 LIS professionals working University libraries of Tamil Nadu expressed their views on the above two concepts comprising of 17 variables. The study identifies “ICT affects collection development”; “High salary for trained staff'; “Lack of balanced collection”; “Affects regular budgeting”; and “ICT takes major share” were the “Primary factors”. It also identifies “Operational cost exceeds”; “Annual Maintenance Cost” and “More budget for digital collection” were the Latent factors in the impact of ICT in budgeting. Similarly “Motivate”; “Capability'; “Easy to use”; “Finding information”; “Improve” and “Flexibility” were considered as “Predominant factors” towards reason for using digital collection where as“Self confidence”; “Participate” and “Cognitively” were considered as “Presumed factors”.