Provides an evaluation of the use of the electronic journals service of the library and information service of the University of Patras, Greece. Asks who these electronic journals service users are, how often they use the service, what their reasons for use are, where their access points for use are, and which search methods and services they use. In addition, invites users to choose between an electronic and print journal title subscription and indicate some factors that would discourage them from accessing an electronic journals service.

This study aims to investigate the query formulation and reformulation patterns such as generalisations, specifications, parallel movements and replacements with synonyms within the search procedure. Results showed that users reformulated their queries by using terms contained in the retrieved results while in the query reformulation process they mainly used terms with parallel meanings. Participants used equally either more specific or more general terms for follow-up queries. Finally, the study revealed that a high proportion of same terms were used instead of unique ones; half of them were included in the Eurovoc thesaurus.

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There has been a massive increase in the amount of information available to people as a result of the Internet and information seekers are expected to be in the position to identify and evaluate this information according to their needs. As a response to this, Subject Based Information Gateways have been introduced providing people with an organised collection of digital information. An evaluation of the Social Science Information Gateway (SOSIG), conducted by an online questionnaire, examines such issues as who the SOSIG users are, how frequently they use the service and what their reasons for using the service are.

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