Needs Assessment for Creating a Digital Library for Virtual Students Based on Different Types of Information Resources and Their Retrieval

The purpose of this research is to investigate the need and impact of digital libraries in virtual students' education and research.

The research method was survey and done by a questionnaire. The statistical population was virtual students of information science and knowledge studies of Tehran University included information management and digital libraries management fields. Data analysis was done in two levels of descriptive and inferential statistics by SPSS software.

Virtual students' need for digital library in virtual education was high and very high at 74%. 84.1% of students found that lack of digital library was effective in virtual students' learning. 63.5% percent of students consider the digital library's impact on classroom virtual presentations very high. Regarding The importance of the type of information source, students have chosen specialized journals (84.7%), e-books (74.7%), multimedia (72.2%), audio sources (47.1%), public books (43.3%) and public journals (34.6%). In terms of importance of resource retrieval components in digital library are respectively thematic retrieval (83.6%), (80.7%), author (58.6%), type (57.7%), format (52.9%) and volume (30.7%).

Virtual students basically need to have a digital library and need more specialized journals, e-books, multimedia, audio resources, public books and public journals. To retrieve resources, they have shown interest respectively to subject, title, author, type, format, and volume.