| This study investigated the frequency of use of information sources in general and for research and teaching purposes in particular by physical scientists, social scientists, and humanities scholars at Carnegie-Mellon University. Out of 390 subjects, 240 answered the questionnaire, making the response rate 61.53 percent.;The findings of this study pointed to the importance of exhibitions, concerts, performances, A.V. materials, and the library resources to humanists. The same information sources were found of negligible importance to both physical scientists and social scientists when conducting a research project. The importance of using personal files by the three groups was observed. It was found that journals were especially important to physical scientists and social scientists. Also, it was found that the use of information sources by respondents varied from one phase of a research project to another. Thus, physical scientists, social scientists, and humanists tended to rely heavily on personal contact in the proposal phase and data analysis and interpretation phase, whereas this reliance appeared to decline in the data collection phase. Other findings were: the importance to respondents of personal contact and personal files as a stimulus for ideas in research; physical scientists and social scientists rated the use of journals for obtaining new ideas in research higher than that of textbooks; similarly, physical scientists and social scientists rated the use of textbooks as sources of new ideas in teaching higher than that of journals.;Data were collected by means of a questionnaire and analyzed using descriptive (Means, standard of deviation, and proportions) and inferential (One-way ANOVA, Two-way ANOVA, and the Scheffe Test) statistics. The null of the three hypotheses of the study were tested at the.05 level of significance. The results obtained in this study showed that the three hypotheses were partially supported. It was found that physical scientists, social scientists, and humanists differed only in their use of informal sources of information in general, in data collection phase, and when developing a new course. No difference was registered in their use of formal sources of information for the same purposes. The impact of the variables tenure and experience on the use of information sources by the subjects has been investigated as an auxiliary factor and found nonsignificant. |
