Survey on use and awareness of medical multimedia databases in national digital library by graduate students at Hamadan University of Medical Sciences

Databases play a main role in education and research, so academics should be familiar with them and use them optimally. The aim of this study was to investigate the use and awareness of medical multimedia databases in integrated digital library by graduate students at the Hamadan University of Medical Sciences.
The current research is a descriptive survey and data collection tool is questionnaire. 260 people, as sample size, were selected by the stratified randomized sampling technique and finally 200 questionnaires were analyzed. And, the collected data were analyzed by means of descriptive statistics like frequency, frequency distribution, and mean using the SPSS16 software.
The results showed that familiarity rate of 85.1% of the Students with medical multimedia databases were unfavorable and 66.3% of the participants never used the multimedia databases. The most important barrier in using multimedia databases was the lack of notification about existence of the databases (74%).
Most of the graduate students were not familiar with multimedia databases at all and never used them. Considering the results of the current study as well as high costs spent on database subscription, it is necessary to pay more attention to the education and use of the databases by experts.