Avaliação do uso de catálogos coletivos de bibliotecas universitárias pela perspectiva do usuário: um estudo sociocognitivo com protocolo verbal

A study has been performed to evaluate the use of online collective catalogs from university libraries in view of the interface of information retrieval and in the users’ socio-cognitive context. The methodology dealt with the elaboration of an organizational diagnostic study in order to characterize the organizational/academic context of UFSCar’s university libraries, by means of the application of a questionnaire to the directors/responsibles of the three libraries and data collection using the Verbal Protocol technique (PV). The PV was performed with eight undergraduate students from the courses of Chemistry, Biological Sciences and Pedagogy, three of which from the campi of São Carlos and Sorocaba and two from the campus of Araras in the information retrieval, for the information retrieval by the access points of author, title, subject, among others in UFSCar’s collective catalog. The Users from the campus of Araras did not perform information retrieval in Pedagogy, because that campus does not offer courses in Humanities. From the analysis of the data collected by questionnaires, as especially shown by the partial results, there is an absence of training with the users on the use of UFSCar’s catalog by most libraries and the need to increase communication with the users about the dissemination of products and services offered by them. It was concluded that libraries need to actuate systemically, prioritizing the development of an indexing policy that comtemplates the definition of a catalog that reflects the socio-cognitive view of users on information retrieval and in the perspective of the university libraries.