The assessment of Iranian academic library websites regarding the quality of dissemination of electronic information

The purpose of this research is to assess the quality of Iranian academic library websites pertaining to dissemination of electronic information, based on visibility, authenticity, navigation, accessibility, information dissemination, quality assessment and updateness, and consequently to rank them according to their conformity to these standards. The study is an applied research, conducted using scientometrics methodology. Research population consists of 80 central library websites of Iranian Ministry of Science, Research and Technology (MSRT) main universities. Data collection tool is a researcher-structured checklist through using descriptive statistics to analyze the findings. Reliability of research tool was calculated 0.8 using kappa coefficient, and its content validity was confirmed by five experts in the field of information and knowledge science, one computer science expert and one library website designer. In the domain of dissemination of electronic information (DEI) the average of standards of visibility (54.48 percent), authenticity (39.29 percent), navigation (68.95 percent), accessibility (46.73 percent), information dissemination (54.48 percent), quality assessment (45.16 percent) and updateness (37.5 percent) were calculated. Tehran, Ilam and Sahand Tabriz with Shahed universities were ranked as the first, the second and the third respectively, while the lowest ranks belong to Sirjan and Torbat Heydarieh universities of technology and Graduate University of Advanced Technology.