www.tjprc.org editor@tjprc.org USER ORIENTATION FOR ACADEMIC LIBRARY IN DIGITAL ERA P. MUTHUMARI 1 & K. CHINNASAMY 2 1 Librarian, JCT College of Engineering and Technology, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India 2 Professor & Head, Department of Library and Information Science, M. K. University, Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India ABSTRACT This is an era of information and communication technology. The library users can access almost all their requirement from internet. But they don’t know how to access information from internet. Even if they know the accessing methods, they don’t know the websites and other details. So, Librarian should obtain the knowledge about the internet and websites and so on. If the librarians familiar with access methods and tools from web is easy to conduct orientation. The important ideology of this paper is to discuss the essentials of user orientation, importance to conduct the orientation, users need and to inform the new resources.Generally, Librarians may follow different techniques to conduct user orientation. Orientation in academic library is very important and it supports to create the awareness among the library users about the library resources. KEYWORDS: Library Resources, User Education INTRODUCTION Objectives • To discuss the understanding of user education by the library professionals. • To discuss the interest of library professionals for conduct orientation programme. • To discuss the difficulties faced by the library professionals during the user education. • To discuss the type of library users. Introduction The user education in academic library is not only introducing the library resources and also to create the importance of the available resources in library and services provide from library ,working hours and what are the resources will be purchased for future requirement and so on. Generally the responsibility of academic library professional is to ensure that the maximum use of library resources and services. Definition According to Shahi “It is a process of activities involved in making the users of the library conscious about tremendous value of information in day to day life to develop interest among the users to seek information as and when they requires”. Fleming (1990) stated that “as various programmes of instruction, education and exploration provided by libraries to users to enable them to make more effective, efficient and independent use of information sources and services to which these libraries provide access”. International Journal of Library Science and Research (IJLSR) ISSN(P): 2250-2351; ISSN(E): 2321-0079 Vol. 4, Issue 5, Oct 2014, 1-4 © TJPRC Pvt. Ltd.