Background: During the period of 2000-2003 users in our institute have had a possibility of accessing quite a vast amount of fulltext resources - either journals directly from publishers (ScienceDirect, SpringerLINK) or fulltext databases provided by aggreggators like EBSCO and ProQuest. These were partly financed by Ministry of Education grants and partly by IKEM's own sources.
Methods: We have regularly collected and evaluated usage statistics. This spring we have also organized a users' survey to assess the usage of resources from users perspective.
Results: The results of both statistics and survey were not suprising. The most heavily used source is definitly ScienceDirect, that is the most favored by the users as well.
Discussion: Usage of electronic fulltexts by end-users is influenced by several factors: 1) relevance of the collection to the field of interest, 2) intuitive interface, 3) timeliness, 4) users being made aware of the sources. It is necessary to have all this in mind when negotiating the licenses, because even if the consortial prices seem to be acceptable at first, they become a heavy burden, if the sources are not used
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