A survey on the information seeking skills of the students of Amirkabir University of Technology

The present research aimed to investigate the librarians’ role in information seeking behavior of students of Amirkabir University. The methodology was descriptive survey using a questionnaire and the reliability of which was measured 0. 89 based on Cronbach’s alpha. Questionnaires were analyzed using SPSS software (version 16). Descriptive statistics techniques were applied. The results revealed that students most important goal when searching for data was to find information for their projects and they used both official and non-official methods for searching information. The books and personal experiences were the most important official and non-official sources for getting information respectively. The Science Direct database ranked first (86. 3%) as the most used electronic database by the students while ISI (web of knowledge)، Springer، ProQuest and Scopus ranked 2nd to 5th respectively. Methods of students’ retrieval of information were consulting by friends and faculty members، making errors & using experience، training courses in libraries and finally seeking advice of librarians. The main obstacles of easy access to information were low speed of the networks and problems of connections، lack of enough English language knowledge، the interruption of universities subscription for electronic databases، lack of enough up to date sources in library and not using special resources by students.