Attitudes of faculty members in library and information departments in Egypt towards the use of academic social networks: A Field Study

This study aims to identify the attitudes of faculty members in library and information departments towards the use of academic social networks, and also to identify the most used academic networks on their part, and the researcher relied in this study on the descriptive field approach, through the preparation of a questionnaire consisting of five axes, and the study sample was represented by faculty members in library and information departments in four Egyptian universities, and the study sample included 120 faculty members and 101 members were responded, i.e. (84.2%) of the total community Education,The results of the study revealed that: the vast majority of the study community uses academic social networks (79.2%); Research Gate was the most widely used academic social network of the study community; one of the main motivations of the study community to use academic social networks was: Publication and sharing of scientific production with others (17.1%), followed by "Identification of the latest developments in the specialization (16.4%), while the challenges and constraints faced when using this type of network were: Unguaranteed privacy (13.0%), followed by intellectual property issues (12.1%) followed by lack of full text availability (11.4%). The researcher therefore made a number of recommendations, including: Develop training courses and workshops on how to use them, need to publicize and market social networks, encourage faculty to join them, need to enact strict laws protecting intellectual property rights within academic networks,