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December 4, 2006
Academic Usability
Here's a great report from the UK. It has some interesting data and insights into the academic and scholarly mindsets of researchers and librarians.
Researchers and discovery services: Behaviour, perceptions and needs
A study commissioned by the Research Information Network
(November 2006)
You can download the PDF here.
Areas of Key Findings
1.3.1 General satisfaction with discovery services
1.3.2 Users cannot always access the resources they have discovered
1.3.3 Means and ends are not clearly delineated
1.3.4 One size doesnt fit all
1.3.5 There is a very long tail of discovery services used by researchers
1.3.6 Researchers use discovery services to find a wide range of resources:
1.3.7 Peers and networks of colleagues are extremely important
Research colleagues are one of the most important sources for virtually every type of enquiry.
1.3.8 Researchers see searching as an integral part of the research
process, and they tend to refine down from a large set of results
possibly over-constrained, initial search.
1.3.9 Researchers are concerned about irrelevant search results, but they are more concerned that they might miss important information
1.3.10 Push is popular but blogs hardly feature
1.3.11 Library support is largely via portals, rather than personal contact
1.3.12 Librarians and researchers are generally in agreement, but there are some important differences
1.3.13 Lack of formal training is not seen as a problem
1.3.14 Specific gaps in provision: A number of specific gaps were identified:
- Access to foreign language materials
- Chapters in multiple-authored books hard to locate
- Backfiles of journals online are too short
- Specialist search engines needed
- Researchers working on the intersection of fields and those in very new fields also felt the difficulty of searching multiple overlapping sources.
Stephen
Posted by stephen at December 4, 2006 4:38 PM
Comments
This is interesting, and not terribly surprising. I find that the lawyers and accountants I work with also like "push" services, and that peers are still the preferred source of information. I would argue that the best thing that we can do as information professionals is to help facilitate those connections between experts - local or global - by the many means at our disposal.
Posted by: Wendy Reynolds at December 5, 2006 7:26 AM