Uso de bibliotecas digitais de periódicos: um estudo comparativo no Portal de Periódicos CAPES entre as áreas do conhecimento

Abstract

Studies of use of digital libraries identify differences in search behavior of users from different areas of knowledge. However, most of these researches do not explain the factors that justify these different behaviors. The present research investigated the use of the Capes Portal, the largest Digital Library of Scientific Journals in Brazil, by Humanities, Linguistics, Arts and Biological Sciences scholars in the Federal University of Minas Gerais. The study was qualitative and used interview techniques, such as critical incident, and of document analysis to understand the reasons for different informational behaviors by researchers from the three areas considering, among other factors, the differences in the organization of the literature of each area. Five directors and 18 researchers of the units involved were interviewed. Data collection included, also, a content analysis of each researcher curriculum vitae. The characteristics of the scientific literature of each area, such as information resource type, type of knowledge in the resources, type of relevance of the resources were investigated. Other factors analyzed included aspects of search behavior, the use and non-use of the DigitalLibrary by each researcher, their reasons for use and non-use, their bibliographic production, barriers encountered and rewards perceived. The results were grouped by knowledge area for comparison. The analysis shows that behavior is not uniform within the same area ofknowledge and that there are differences in the use and non-use of the Portal among scholars from different departments or sub-areas of the same area. The difficulties in using the interface, the predominance of material in foreign languages, the absence of material that theresearchers look for, the lack of tradition of use of some journals are some of the factors that negatively affect the use of the Portal among researchers from the Humanities, Linguistics and Arts. The importance of the Digital Library for scientific communication, the availability of full text and the presence of important materials of the area of the researcher, among other factors, are decisive for the use of the Portal, especially among researchers of the Biological Sciences.