User Studies in India: Key Research and Findings

How do librarians know whether their collections, services, and reading rooms actually meet the needs of the people who walk through the door? The answer lies in user studies – systematic investigations into who uses a library, why they use it, what they need, and what stops them from finding it. While much of the early theory came from the West, India built its own substantial body of research over the decades. From documentation centres in New Delhi to a satellite research campus in Bangalore, librarians and scholars here have repeatedly turned the lens on their own users. This post traces that journey through its landmark surveys and the people who shaped it.

Why user studies became a priority 🔗

For a long time, libraries were judged by what they held rather than by how well they served. A large book stock was treated as proof of a good library. User studies challenged that assumption. They argued that the value of information is realised only when it is actually used, and that a collection sitting unread serves no real purpose. A user study is essentially a structured examination of users’ information needs and behaviour, designed to reveal what people genuinely require from their libraries.

Globally, this thinking gained momentum after major scientific conferences in the mid-twentieth century. Early studies concentrated heavily on scientists in fields like medicine, physics, chemistry, and engineering, partly because scientific publishing in these disciplines was already well developed. India entered this conversation seriously in the 1960s, and the institutions that led the way were tied closely to scientific and technical documentation.

INSDOC and the earliest surveys 🔗

The Indian National Scientific Documentation Centre (INSDOC) sits at the very beginning of India’s user-study story. Set up in 1952 under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research with technical help from UNESCO, INSDOC was meant to support the scientific community with documentation services. It became an independent unit with a full-time director in 1963 and steadily expanded into computer-based services and the National Science Library. The organisation also launched Annals of Library Science in 1954, with Dr. S. R. Ranganathan as its first editor.

The 1964 current awareness survey 🔗

One of INSDOC’s most instructive early efforts came in 1964. The centre ran a survey to evaluate a current awareness service it published, the INSDOC List of Current Scientific Literature. The findings were blunt: the service was not serving its users as intended. Acting on that evidence, INSDOC discontinued the publication and replaced it with Indian Science Abstracts, an abstracting service that remains a recognised resource today. This is a clean example of a user study directly reshaping a service rather than gathering dust as a report.

The 1967 electronics pilot survey 🔗

A few years later, in 1967, INSDOC conducted a pilot survey to assess the information needs of researchers working in electronics. These pilot efforts were modest in scale, but their importance lies in method and intent. They established that documentation centres should consult their users systematically before designing or revising services. [Image: A 1960s-era documentation centre reading room with researchers consulting bound scientific journals]

Carl M. White’s survey of the University of Delhi library 🔗

If INSDOC pioneered survey work in scientific documentation, the first major academic library use survey in India is widely credited to Carl M. White. An American library educator who had served as a dean at Columbia University, White carried out a detailed study of the University of Delhi Library in cooperation with the university’s Planning Unit, published as A Survey of the University of Delhi Library in 1965.

The study ran to well over a hundred pages and included charts, maps, and floor plans, examining how the library functioned and how it was used. It was significant for two reasons. First, it brought a rigorous, internationally informed survey method to an Indian university setting at a time when such work was rare. Second, it treated the library as a system to be evaluated against the actual needs of students and researchers, not just an administrative unit to be described. White’s survey became a reference point for later Indian library planners and is regularly cited as a foundational academic-sector study. [Image: Historic façade of a University of Delhi library building]

IASLIC and building professional awareness 🔗

Conducting surveys is one thing; convincing an entire profession that user research matters is another. This is where the Indian Association of Special Libraries and Information Centres (IASLIC) played a quiet but important role. Founded on 3 September 1955 in Kolkata by J. Saha, A. K. Mukherjee, and G. B. Ghosh, IASLIC supports the development of special librarianship and coordinates research, training, seminars, and publications across the country, as described in its organisational profile.

IASLIC’s seminars and its journal, the IASLIC Bulletin, became platforms where the user-centred view of librarianship could spread. The association held a seminar focused on users and library and information services, helping to push professional attention toward the people libraries are meant to serve rather than only toward collections and cataloguing. Its national seminars have continued this thread for decades; a recent edition was themed around information literacy and building an enlightened user community. By repeatedly placing the user at the centre of professional debate, IASLIC helped normalise the idea that user studies are a core responsibility, not an optional extra.

M. S. Sridhar and the maturing of user research 🔗

By the time the field matured, India had produced a researcher whose work became almost synonymous with user studies in the scientific sector: Dr. M. S. Sridhar. A postgraduate in mathematics and management with a doctorate in library and information science, Sridhar headed the Library and Documentation Division at the ISRO Satellite Centre (ISAC) in Bangalore for many years, after earlier work at the University of Mysore, the National Aeronautical Laboratory, and the Indian Institute of Management.

The ISRO Satellite Centre study 🔗

Sridhar’s most influential contribution grew out of his doctoral research into the information behaviour of Indian space technologists. Working with a population of roughly 800 scientists and engineers at ISAC, of whom about seventy were women, he investigated how these professionals sought, used, and shared information. The results were published in journals through the late 1980s and later compiled in his book Information Behaviour of Scientists and Engineers, a case study of Indian space technologists.

What set this work apart was its ambition. Rather than producing a single snapshot survey, Sridhar correlated user characteristics with behaviour, examined patterns of library visits and length of stay, studied publishing and citation habits, and analysed how technologists used catalogues. It was a sustained, methodologically careful programme of research rather than a one-off report. [Image: A research library at a space technology campus with scientists at workstations]

Beyond ISRO: non-users and method 🔗

Sridhar also pushed the field into an area that many surveys ignore: the people who do not use the library at all. His study on non-users and non-use of libraries argued that understanding why people stay away is just as valuable as studying active users, because non-use points directly to gaps in service, access, or awareness. Across more than a hundred research papers and several books, his writing on research methodology and user research has become standard reading for Indian LIS students.

The widening landscape of recent research 🔗

The work begun by INSDOC, White, IASLIC, and Sridhar opened the door to a steady stream of later studies across the country. Krishan Kumar’s survey of teachers and research scholars in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Delhi extended user research within the academic sciences. Studies of electronic resource use, such as work on research scholars at the Central Food Technological Research Institute in Mysore, reflected the shift toward digital collections in the 2000s.

The themes also broadened beyond elite scientific institutions. A survey of e-reading habits among public library users in the Erode area of Tamil Nadu pointed attention toward ordinary library users rather than only specialists. At the same time, reviews of the field have noted persistent gaps. An analysis of user studies published in leading journals between 2000 and 2014 found that most research concentrated on academic libraries, with special libraries a distant second, while public libraries received very little attention. Groups such as women, farmers, rural users, and persons with disabilities remained under-researched, signalling where the next wave of work is most needed.

Taken together, these efforts show a clear trajectory. User studies in the country moved from narrow scientific documentation surveys in the 1960s, through a landmark academic survey and growing professional advocacy, to sophisticated behavioural research and, finally, toward a more inclusive agenda that asks whose needs are still being overlooked. The methods grew more rigorous, the user groups more varied, and the underlying conviction more firmly established: a library that does not study its users cannot truly serve them.

What do you think? If a user study were conducted in your own college or university library today, which group of students do you think would turn out to be the most overlooked? And given that public libraries remain so under-researched, what would you most want to find out about the people who never visit them at all?

References

1. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/lisp4/chapter/user-studies-users-education/
2. https://or.niscpr.res.in/index.php/ALIS
3. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/35348/5/Unit-12.pdf
4. https://catalog.princeton.edu/catalog/SCSB-4222823
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Association_of_Special_Libraries_and_Information_Centres
6. https://amuiaslic.in/
7. https://files01.core.ac.uk/download/pdf/290477332.pdf
8. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=tvLpZqUAAAAJ&hl=en
9. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/lisp15/chapter/evolution-of-user-studies/