The Realities of Virtual Space: Lessons from Observing Library Users
John Law, ProQuest
• I know John! I met him at ALA, but didn’t realize he had such a cool title! (Vice President, Discovery Services)
• New Realities: Users are in the drivers seat, with more access to information, born-digital users learned to find information with web applications, users have an expectation for seamless access
• Libraries face a challenge: we have to keep pace with these escalating user expectations
• Two phased research project conducted with students who had a real research assignment “going native,” found students using facebook flyers to find students so they could be anonymous as surveyors, observed undergrads, grads, across disciplines, novice and sophisticated research, 7 institutions, 60 participants, held in the library, computer labs, coffee shops, apartments (Most are doing their research in their apartments), captured remote sessions (very cool software, uservue, lets you record it, mark places in where they were looking, let researchers talk in the sidebar.
• Found the remote sessions were really useful, saw more natural behaviors
• Findings: how students decide which to use, how using library resources, how students are really using Google, how social networking sites factor into student research
• How students choose: library outreach, course instructor (this becomes the holy grail), brand awareness, and google
• Vast majority attempted to use library resources at some point, many began there, once in library resource most can conduct research, students often use more than one resource at a time, abstracts are essential; consistent complaint is that filtering takes time, and they know that library resources will require less filtering
• Chief inhibitors to success with library resources: lack of awareness, difficulty navigating website to find the appropriate e-resources, search catalog front and center (even though normally looking for journal articles), authentication barriers
• Showed a number of screencasts of user behavior, showed that discipline based organization is not useful when doing interdisciplinary work
• How students really use Google: primary research tool (rarely), supplement research (often), handy look-ups (vast majority)
• Google as primary research tool: when quality isn’t a primary concern, but speed is, insufficiently aware of library e-resources, bad experiences with library e-resources
• Google as a handy look-up tool: locate known resources, get specific answers (Wikipedia in this way, too, tend to be apologetic about it)
• End-user survey to support earlier study, invited through ProQuest products and Facebook ads, about 10,000 respondents
• Comparing library databases to Google: across the board-> library has more credible; which is more useful-> library better than google, but numbers are lower than the first question; which has easier inferface-> google; which better for research -> library; which better for fast facts -> google
• Library/databases is positioned for research; Google is positioned as fast look-up tool.
• Value library content, want to get to library content, but the process is not as seamless as it should be.
• Social Networking Sites and how they factor in: student said of course they don’t use social networking sites in research. One student said used for group project group for communication, and is used for study breaks, but not actually used for research at this point.
• Study done by John Law, VP, Discovery Services; Joanna Markel, MSI, Manager, User Experience Design, and Serena Posenhan, PhD, Specialist, User Experience Design
• Q&A: couldn’t see a difference in behaviors based on where they worked.
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