Encouraging to Improving the use and search techniques skills on the webbased e- scholarly Databases subscribed by UOBL

This experimental and descriptive user study intend to focus in particular to improve search
skills and encourage usage through certain techniques and tips required to formulate queries
and searches to get best results of the information needed from the e-scholarly data bases
prescribed by the University of Bahrain Library. A user study with 41 participants was
conducted to experiment two e- scholarly database systems from Elsevier and EBSCO
(Sciencedirect, Business source complete) as training tools and guidance given to the students’
users by the researcher to search particular topics. Kirkpatrick’s training evaluation model was
used to analyze training session’s effectiveness. Two questionnaires are distributed using type of
Google application tool (On-line Google form) one pre-lab training session given and the
second one post-lab training. It is found that although search results are significantly better
through using structured rather than unstructured or simple searching, utilizing more complex
searching operators may not worth the effort as it is more likely for users to employ them
incorrectly. It is also found that a large number of respondents were using field searching and
Boolean operators to access information from e- scholarly databases.