Abstract:
This research aims at studying the use of the central library by faculty members and students of Surat Thani Rajabhat University, involving their objectives, frequency, information resources, library services, information resources, information searching methods, and problems faced in using the central library. The findings reveal that the majority of the use by faculty members is for the purpose of teaching preparation and the use of the library is uncertain as far as frequency is concerned. The purpose of students use of the library is for studying preparation and the frequency is about 2-3 times a week. Most of faculty members and students use books with business administration contents. Both faculty members and students mostly make use of the information resources in Thai. In the aspect of library services, it is found that circulation services are the main services, followed by Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC). The problems regarding information resources mostly experienced by the two groups of users are: their contents are dated and incomprehensive, not covering all fields of studies provided in the university. Related to the services, it is obvious that the computers in service for the internet are limited in number; there is little new information provided on the central librarys website. Moreover, there are very few photocopiers stationed in the library, which results in a long wait among users. As for information searching methods, which is to be made online, a long period of time is required because the network is relatively slow. One more matter to point out is the mumber of seats for reading is rather small. The two hypotheses include: 1) The majority of the faculty members and students of Surat Thani Rajabhat University make use of books and journals, the circulation service, and the OPAC, and 2) The problem experienced by the instructors at a high level is the dated information resources, and the students is the low efficiency of the computers available in the central library. The research results agree and disagree with the hypotheses