A Survey on Needs Assessment for In-service Training among Academic Librarians in Isfahan

Rapid development of information technology, extent of information, media variety of information and the growing information needs, made librarians to keep pace with these developments in order to respond quickly, accurately and with the quality to needs of users. Planning education for librarians depends on the accurate needs assessment studies and the purpose of this study was needs assessment of in-service training courses for librarians. This is a survey- descriptive study among 180 librarians of Isfahan State Universities who were selected through census methods. Data collection was carried out through self administrated questionnaire which validity and reliability was confirmed by experts and calculating Cronbach's alpha (0.82), respectively and finally 142 questionnaires returned. Data analysis conducted by SPSS software. The highest level of in-service training needs was in the fields of: methods of information searching on the Internet, principles of librarian's communication skills and familiarity with databases and search them and research method in Library and Information Science. The priority of providing training in libraries should be allocated according to the above mentioned findings and these courses with rich educational content, instructors and specialists and continuously should be performed and evaluated in libraries.