The awareness of academic librarians towards Open Access resources to support reference services: A case of private institutions of higher learning in Gaborone, Botswana

Abstract

Open access have been acclaimed to have greater impact on research, teaching and learning in higher education through increased and easier access to scholarly research output.. The use of open access has also afforded researchers extensive visibility and usage of research findings to researchers with more diverse audience. Increased exposure to research also amplify citation rate, therefore provides connections that researchers can use as a path to publishing without printing costs. In teaching and learning open access provides wide range barrier free information to teachers and learners. The present research observes that library users, especially students do not use the open access resources that are available. Now the question that rose was why are the users not aware? Is it because users are not aware of the resources? Is it because the users are not interested?or librarians are not doing enough to shed some light on open access resources. This research seeks to assess if librarians know about the resources and to assess how they use the resources as reference sources. The focus is on librarians because they are usually the first point of call in research for both learning and teaching. The objective of this paper is to assess the awareness of librarians in private institutions of higher learning towards open access information resources as complementary reference resources. The study set out to investigate which OA resources the librarian refers users to. It further explores the reasons for choosing these OA and how librarians use the resources. It will also look at the obstacles and challenges faced by librarian in using open access resources. The study will focus on six private higher education institutions in Gaborone namely are Botho University, Limkokwing University, Ba Isago University College, ABM University College, Botswana Accountancy College and Gaborone Institute of Professional Studies. A qualitative approached will be adopted to gather data from librarians in these institutions through a self administered questionnaire.