R M Hamid Jamali

E-textbook use, information seeking behaviour and its impact: Case study business and management

This paper evaluates the e-book usage and information seeking and reading behaviour of thousands of business and management students. Comparisons are made with students in other subjects. The data largely come from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)-funded National e-Books Observatory (NeBO) project as well as the JISC User Behaviour Observational Study. The main sources of data were: a) transactional logs obtained from the MyiLibrary platform regarding 127 UK universities; b) questionnaire data for more than 5000 students and staff at these universities; c) hard-copy library circulation and retail sales data; and d) focus groups held with 50 staff and students from selected universities. The main findings were that e-textbooks can prove to be extremely popular and widely used, mainly for obtaining snippets of information and for fact finding. The main reason for using e-textbooks was ease of access and convenience.

Scholarly e-books: the views of 16,000 academics : Results from the JISC National E-Book Observatory

Purpose – This study, a part of JISC‐funded UK National E‐Books Observatory, aims to find out about the perspective of students and academics, the main e‐book users, on e‐books. Design/methodology/approach – The paper provides an analysis of two open‐ended questions about e‐books, contained in a UK national survey conducted between 18 January and 1 March 2008. The survey obtained a response from more than 20,000 academic staff and students; 16,000 free‐text responses were obtained to these two questions. Findings – The study discloses that convenience associated with online access along with searchability was the biggest advantage of e‐books. The study shows a potential market for e‐textbooks; however, e‐books have yet to become more student‐friendly by improving features such as printing and screenreading. Originality/value – This is the biggest survey of its kind ever conducted and it improves ones knowledge of what the academic community thinks of e‐books.

Researchers' e-journal use and information seeking behaviour

This paper presents the results of the second phase of a Research Information Network study, which sought to establish the impact of e-journals on the scholarly behaviour of researchers in the UK. The first phase of the project was a deep log analysis of the usage and information seeking behaviour of researchers in connection with the ScienceDirect and Oxford Journals databases. This paper reports on the second phase, which sought to explain and provide context for the deep log data by taking the questions raised by the quantitative study to the research community via interview, questionnaire and observation. Nine major research institutions took part, six subjects were covered and the behaviour of about 1400 people was analyzed. Findings show that academic journals have become central to all disciplines and that the e-form is the prime means of access. Most importantly the study demonstrates that computer usage logs provide an accurate picture of online behaviour. High levels of gateway service use point to the re-intermediating of the broken chain between publisher and reader.

Revisiting 'obsolescence' and journal article 'decay' through usage data: an analysis of digital journal use by year of publication

The publication age or date of documents used (or not used) has long fascinated researchers and practitioners alike. Much of this fascination can be attributed to the weeding opportunities the data is thought to provide for libraries in their never-ending battle to find the space to accommodate their expanding collections. In general journal article age studies have shown an initial increase in use/citation, then a gradual or sharp decline, depending on the discipline concerned. This characteristic has been termed obsolescence or decay and was largely measured, in the absence of accurate journal usage/borrowing data, by citations. In the sciences the decay rate was shown to be the greatest. This was largely put down to the rapid obsolescence of much scientific content. New research findings, methods or ensuing events rendered the material obsolescent. Of course, when reviewing the data we need to be reminded of the fact that citation studies reveal ‘‘use’’ by authors, whereas library loans or downloads represent actual use by readers, and it is readers that libraries and digital libraries principally target. Clearly the fall of in use with time must have also been a function of the way that libraries arranged their material (in reverse chronological order); a lack of time and patience will inevitably result in readers aborting their searches after a few years and those few years will be the most recent ones. Similarly, it must also have been a function of the difficulties of searching hard-copy back volumes/issues in libraries over time.

Interdisciplinarity and the information-seeking behavior of scientists

Adopting an intradisciplinary perspective, this article evaluates the information-seeking behavior of academics from different subfields of physics and astronomy. It investigates the effect of interdisciplinarity (reliance on the literature of other subjects) and the scatter of literature on two aspects of the information-seeking behavior: methods used for keeping up-to-date and for identifying articles. To this end a survey of 114 PhD students and staff at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University College London was carried out. The findings showed that the subfields that are more interdisciplinary or have a more scattered literature are more likely to use general search facilities for finding information. The study also showed that cross-disciplinary use of the literature is not necessarily an indicator of scattered literature. The study reveals intradisciplinary differences among physicists and astronomers in terms of their information-seeking behavior and highlights the risk of overlooking the characteristics of information-seeking behavior of specialized subject communities by focusing on very broad subject categories.

Online use and information seeking behaviour

The paper reports on the results of the project ‘Evaluating the usage and impact of e-journals in the UK’. Using deep log analysis techniques, we evaluated the use of the Oxford Journals database in regard to life sciences, economics and history by 10 major UK research institutions. The aim of the study was to investigate researchers’ digital behaviour, and to ascertain whether it varied by subjects and disciplines, or in relation to the institutions. The findings revealed significant subject and institutional differences. Life scientists were the biggest users. Economists made the greatest use of abstracts. Historians proved to be the most active searchers. Research intensive universities were characterized by high volume use and short session times, light sessions, and sessions which utilized few of the search functions available. Open access journals featured strongly in the ranked lists of life sciences and history; and Google was an extremely popular means of accessing journal content, especially so in the case of historians.

User diversity: as demonstrated by deep log analysis

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate a novel form of deep log analysis by linking questionnaire data with transactional server log data generated by the same users; and to provide a richer understanding of the information-seeking behaviour of a strategic community of virtual scholars. Design/methodology/approach – Usage statistics were obtained from logs for an 18-month period: 16,865 sessions were covered and 110,029 pages were viewed. Searching behaviour was studied in regard to number of returned hits and number of searches in a session. A questionnaire survey was also conducted to identify ScienceDirect users according to the subject/discipline to which they belonged and attitude towards some scholarly communication issues. The answers of more than 750 ScienceDirect users to the questionnaire were linked to the usage logs of the same users through matching internet protocol (IP) addresses. Findings – The study reveals large differences between scholars in different subjects in terms of information-seeking behaviour and their interaction with electronic journal systems. Practical implications – The findings can be utilised to improve electronic journal systems such as ScienceDirect in order to provide more suitable service for users in different subjects. Originality/value – The originality of the paper lies in its methodology that links questionnaire attitudinal data to the web log data of the same users at individual level to gain a better understanding of users’ behaviour.

Web robot detection in the scholarly information environment

An increasing number of robots harvest information on the world wide web for a wide variety of purposes. Protocols developed at the inception of the web laid out voluntary procedures in order to identify robot behaviour, and exclude it if necessary. Few robots now follow this protocol and it is now increasingly difficult to filter for this activity in reports of on-site activity. This paper seeks to demonstrate the issues involved in identifying robots and assessing their impact on usage in regard to a project which sought to establish the relative usage patterns of open access and non-open access articles in the Oxford University Press published journal Glycobiology, which offers in a single issue articles in both forms. A number of methods for identifying robots are compared and together these methods found that 40% of the raw logs of this journal could be attributed to robots.

Employing log metrics to evaluate search behaviour and success: case study BBC search engine

This paper argues that metrics can be generated from search transactional web logs that can help evaluate search engine effectiveness. Search logs from the BBC website were analysed and metrics extracted. Two search metrics — the time lapse between searches and the number of searches in a session — were developed to see whether they could measure search success or satisfaction. In all, 4 million search statements by 900,000 users were evaluated. The BBC search engine possessed a number of functional attributes which sought to improve retrieval and these were subjected to the two metrics to help determine how successful they were in practice. There was some evidence to support the proposition that the search outcome metrics did indeed indicate the effectiveness of engine functionality. The authors argue that this result is significant in that the identification of search outcome metrics will pave the way for assessing the effectiveness of site specific search engines and a greater understanding of the effectiveness of search engine functionality.

Obtaining subject data from log files using deep log analysis: case study OhioLINK:

Traditionally web site statistics and analysis focus on the organization and location information of Internet Protocol addresses and do not analyse sub-network and computer-label information. This paper aims to extract and make use of the information content of sub-network labels in transactional server log files and add an additional level to transaction log analysis. The authors apply microanalytical procedures (i.e. analysis of small segments and sections of log files) to the analysis of log files of the OhioLINK electronic journal service. The authors demonstrate an analysis based on extracted sub-network information and argue that these names can be interpreted as departmental (subject) names. They present an analysis between journal subject groupings and departments based on sub-network labels and find a degree of correlation between department name and subject of journal use. Further, the authors break down journal usage by sub-network label information. The analyses show that sub-network names reflect the physical location of the computer. This presents another possibility of analysing what journals are being used by which academic department.