CiL2008: What Do Users Really Do in their Native Habitat? pt 2

This talk was the second part of the session, and a representative from ProQuest discussed a recent study they did about how students perform research. They involved 7 universities, recruiting students (through Facebook!) who were actively performing research, and sent researchers to observe the students for 90 minutes, and then ask follow-up questions.

The reasons students chose the resources they used were mostly down to three things:

1. A course instructor had recommended it to them
2. They heard about them through library outreach
3. Brand awareness - in other words, they remembered the name of the database

An instructor giving them a recommendation was a golden endorsement for the resource - students would rely on those for *years*, but it can backfore: sometimes the students relied on those recommendations exclusively, sometimes even when they weren't very useful for the topic they were researching or there were other databases that covered the same subject.

This is from a previous post I did here, but I got the story from this session so I'll repeat it:

One thing that everyone agrees on is that awareness - making students and other patrons aware of what's out there to help them - is the key point. The ProQuest guy who talked about their study (I'll write it up later) told a story about one of their sbjects. They observed a number of students for 1.5 hours each as they did research for a paper. This kid was the poster child for database use. He went to the database page on his university library's website and went through every single atabase relevant to his topic. When asked why he did this, he gave a speech about how many resources were available and how useful they were, etc. When asked how long he'd been researching this way, he replied "Six weeks." Why the change six weeks ago? He said that a librarian had come to one of his classes and told them that and showed them how to do it.

The vast majority of students *attempted* to use library resources.

Once they were in a licensed product (i.e. database), most had no serious difficulty in conducting research. The students would often work with multiple resources and search tools at the same time.

Abstracts were essential in identifying relevant articles.

Things that inhibited research success:

-- lack of awareness, not knowing what's available
-- Difficult to navigate library websites to locate appropriate e-resources
-- Often they'd search the library catalog for articles.
-- authentication barriers, especially considering limited access points

How they really used Google:

1) as a primary research tool
2) to supplement research
3) for handy, quick look-ups <-- the statistics that say 90% of Web researchers use Google probably belong in this category. Often after doing the librarys earch, they'd do a quick Google on the topic.

Why use Google?

-- when quality isn't a concern
-- insufficiently aware of library e-resources
-- bad experiences with library e-resources

Using Google as a look-up tool:

-- to locate known resources like known websites, major newspapers, and library resources
-- to get specific answers like general information about a topic, definitions of terms or phrases, or to complete a citation.