A Survey on the Use of Electronic Databases and Electronic Journals Accessed through the Web by the Academic Staff of Israeli Universities by Judit Bar-Ilan, Bluma C. Peritz, and Yecheskel Wolman The results of an extensive survey of the senior academic staff of the Israeli universities on their use of electronic journals and databases are presented. The major findings are that the use of electronic sources is already widespread among the respondents and more than 50% found the electronic services indispensable. Disparities were found between the usage patterns in the different disciplines. School of Library, Archive and Information Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem {judit,bluer}@cc.huji.ac.il, cheskea@vms.huji.ac.il T his paper presents the results of a survey of senior academic staff of the Israeli universities, conducted at the end of 2000 and the beginning of 2001. Its purpose was to examine usage patterns, acceptance, perceived impor- tance, and satisfaction with electronic da- tabases and electronic journals; and to study the influences of academic field, age, gender, and rank and on the results. The main source of access to electronic databases and e-journals is the MAL- MAD (Israel Center for Digital Informa- tion Services) Consortium. MALMAD provides access to a large number of elec- tronic data sources (a list of these sources can be found at the MALMAD site, http:// libnet.ac.il/libnet/malmad-services-sub- ject.htm). Access to all these services is through the Web. The members of MAL- MAD are (in alphabetical order): Bar-Ilan University, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, The Hebrew University of Jerusa- lem, The Open University of Israel, The Technion, Tel-Aviv University, Univer- sity of Haifa, and The Weizmann Institute of Science. The consortium was founded in 1998. 1,2 Our initial purpose was to examine the use by the senior academic staff of the above-mentioned institutions of the data- bases and e-journals licensed through MALMAD. However, we realized that individual institutions and libraries some- times give access to additional data sources, which are also accessible through the Web. A few examples: members of the Hebrew University have access to ISI’s Journal Citation Report; the Hebrew University’s Mathematics and Computer Science library gives access to the ACM Digital Library to members of the Insti- tute of Mathematics and of the School of Engineering; the Library of the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies at the Hebrew University gives access to its users to the Journal of Documentation, since the print subscription automatically entitles access to the electronic version. There are also some freely accessible da- tabases (for example, PubMed in medi- cine and life sciences, ResearchIndex in computer science, http://www.researchin- dex.com/) and e-journals (for example, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Re- search, http://www.cs.washington.edu/ research/jair/; Cybermetrics, http://www. cindoc.csic.es/cybermetrics/) on the Web. Since we could not expect the faculty members to be able to differentiate be- tween sources licensed through MAL- MAD or by other sources, the survey in- cluded all databases and e-journals accessible through the World Wide Web. MALMAD collects and receives from the service providers and publishers sta- tistics on the usage of electronic data ser- vices (for example, number of sessions, number of downloads, length of sessions, breakdown per university). Results of this survey supplement the statistics, since they provide first-hand data not only on frequency of use, but also about the per- ceived importance and satisfaction/dissat- isfaction with various aspects of existing services. The users were also asked to name databases/e-journals needed but currently missing from the list provided by MALMAD and the universities. The results of this survey are supposed to serve as inputs for MALMAD’s future policy decisions. 346 The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Volume 29, Number 6, pages 346 –361