Searching for information: The needs of computing undergraduate students

• Main Author: Mohd Nadzir, Maslinda
• Format: Monograph
• Language: English
• Published: Universiti Utara Malaysia 2014
• Subjects: QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science; Z665 Library Science. Information Science
• Online Access: http://repo.uum.edu.my/14047/1/1.pdf; http://repo.uum.edu.my/14047/
• Institution: Universiti Utara Malaysia

Undergraduate students are actively seeking information for preparing university tasks such as course assignments and project papers.They should be familiar with both library and Web sources in order to search information effectively to satisfy their needs.However, many students are unaware with various information sources that are available, and the use of those sources to search for information.The purpose of this study is to explore information seeking behaviour among School of Computing undergraduate students within the context of searching information for university tasks.Survey method was used to collect data for this study.A questionnaire was randomly distributed to 170 undergraduate students at School of Computing, Universiti Utara Malaysia in Malaysia. The overall response rate was 100%. The collected data was analyzed by using Statistical Package for Social Sciences for Windows (SPSS) version 19.0. The findings shown that academic information were the most needed information for completing university tasks.This study concludes that most of the students prefer to use Google and other search engines to search academic information.Accordingly, Google search engine was the most frequently used search engine by the students in searching academic information.