The information-seeking behaviour of the virtual scholar: from use to users

David NicholasCIBER

University College Londondavid.nicholas@ucl.ac.uk

www.ucl.ac.uk/slais/research/ciber

Risk of disconnection, yet great opportunity?

• Move from monitoring activity to monitoring users

• Important given composition of the virtual audience & its anonymity

• Too pre-occupied with resources/content when we offer a declining proportion

• Content was king, consumer now king• Via information seeking reach high

ground: establish satisfaction, scholarly outcomes and best practice

• Publishers/librarians know less about audience than others

The Virtual Scholar

No PowerPoint puff: evidence base

1. UK National E-Books Observatory. JISC, 2008-92. The Impact of Open Access Journal Publishing. OUP,

2006-3. Digital Lives. AHRC, 2007-94. Biomedical Information Marketplace. British Library, 2007

5. Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future (Google Generation). British Library and JISC, 2007

6. SuperBook. Emerald and Wiley Publishers, 2006–77. Authors as users: analysis of ScienceDirect. Elsevier, 2005-6;8. New journal publishing models: the 2005 CIBER survey of journal

author behaviour and attitudes. Publishers Association and STM, 2005

9. MaxData. US Institute of Museum & Library Services, 2005-7

10. Scholarly communication in the digital environment: what do authors want? Publishers Association, 2003-4

11. Digital journals – site licensing, library consortia deals and use. Ingenta Institute, 2002.

The technique: digital information footprintsThe technique: digital information footprints

Information Seeking Characteristics

ActivityMetrics

User Characteristics

1. Number of pages viewed2. Number of full-text downloads3. Number of sessions conducted4. Site penetration5. Time spent viewing a page6. Time spent on a session7. Number of searches undertaken in a session8. Number of repeat visits made9. Number of journals used10. Number of views per journal

1. Subject/ discipline2. Academic status3. Geographical location4. Institution5. Type of organization used to access the service6. User demographics

A. Type of content viewed1. Number of journals used in a session2. Names of journals used3. Subject of e-journal used5. Age of journal used6. Type of material viewed 7. Type of full-text view8. Size of article used9. Publication status of article

B. Searching style1.Search approach adopted2. Number of searches conducted in a session3. Number of search terms used in search4. Form of navigation

28 Key Features

Profiling information seeking behaviour

Huge numbers of scholars and high demand for the scholarly product

• Access main driver. More people drawn into scholarly net (all scholars now!) & existing users can search more freely & flexibly.

• One site saw 6 million pages viewed in three months

• Database containing full-text of 6000 journals saw 5995 used in one month.

• One e-journal database attracted half a million users in a month

• Spiralling growth

Especially from overseas

• In case of UK Government funded scholarly websites less than a third of visits from UK scholars.

• In case of OUP journal, Glycobiology, less than 7% of visitors were from the UK.

• Overseas scholars taking more advantage of the scholarly resource?

Many of them are young

• Students constitute the biggest users in terms of visits and pages viewed, which is largely because they constitute the biggest scholarly community.

• Information seeking different• Spend more time online• Some people see them as

‘noise’!

Even more are robots

• Best kept secret• Around half of all visitors

to a scholarly site are robots. In a few cases account for 90% of views

• Mimic human information seeking to get entry

• To do this they need to ….

…be promiscuous

• Around 40% of people visiting do not come back, shop around

• Ascribed to: poor retrieval skills, leaving memories in cyberspace, massive choice, Google constantly refreshing the virtual landscape

• Young people are more promiscuous

…bounce

• Half of all visitors view 1-3 pages from thousands available. Bounce in again and then out again.

• Bounce because of search engines, massive choice and shortage of time.

• Overseas scholars bounce less and young people more (a story is unfolding!)

…flick

• Some bouncing can be attributed to flicking

• A kind of channel hopping, checking form of behaviour

…view

• Scholars conditioned by emailing, executive summaries & text messaging

• Don’t view an article online for more than 2 minutes

• Spend more time ‘reading’ short articles online than long ones…quick wins

• If its long, either read the abstract or squirrel it away for a day when it will not be read

…power browse

• Hoover through titles, contents pages and abstracts at a huge rate of knots

• Books now opened –up, motorways driven through

• The horizontal replaces vertical

…navigate

• Navigating towards content in very large digital spaces a major activity.

• Spend half their time viewing content, rest of the time they are trying to find there way to it (or out of it).

• So many possible routes to content people get lost (excited) - leads to bouncing, encourages promiscuity

…they are not all the same

• National differences: Germans most ‘successful’ searchers and most active information seekers. Canadians & Australians most interested in older material

• Age differences: older users more likely to come back, and view abstracts. Elderly users had most problems searching – two thirds of searches obtained zero returns!

• Gender differences: women more likely to view articles in HTML and return to a site (less promiscuous!)

…brand, don’t go there, there are problems

• Difficult in cyberspace: responsibility/authority almost impossible in a digital environment – so many players

• Also what you think is brand is not what other people think

• And then there is cool.

…do not behave like a librarian (a real give-away)

• Adage we are all librarians now used to highlight the fact that, thanks to the Internet, everyone has access to vast stores of information and they would behave like one.

• It has not turned out like that...

… they became eShoppers

• Because of massive choice• Using a common platform

means habits rub off. Examples

• Two major influences on eShopping can claim an information pedigree: a) Amazon (site design & navigation), a site with origins in selling books, and Google, a search engine.

Impacts, outcomes etc

• In broad terms scholarly behaviour can be portrayed as being active , bouncing, navigating, checking and viewing. It is also promiscuous, diverse and volatile

• What does it all mean?

Dumbed down information seeking?

• Study confirms what many are beginning to suspect: that the web is having a profound impact on how we conceptualise, seek, evaluate and use information. What Marshall McLuhan called 'the Gutenberg galaxy' - that universe of linear exposition, quiet contemplation, disciplined reading and study - is imploding, and we don't know if what will replace it will be better or worse. But at least you can find the Wikipedia entry for 'Gutenberg galaxy' in 0.34 seconds

Access no longer the outcome

• Go beyond a warm feeling• What do we think is good/bad information

seeking?• Are there obvious outcomes associated with

it?• Blind wine tasting• RIN study• Final thought: the Web year

If you are a (rare) reader not a viewer there is a book

BOOK: Digital Consumers: Re-shaping the Information Professions Edited by: David Nicholas & Ian Rowlands, Facet Publishing, 2008Key strategic areas covered include:• theories and concepts surrounding digital information use• the digital information marketplace and its economics• the psychology of the digital information consumer• the information-seeking behaviour of the virtual scholar• searching behaviour of the digital consumer• authority and trust in the digital environment• the young digital information consumer• lessons from the e-shopper

Slides to view later

Ranking by ScienceDirect use

University Times RankingRelative

Usage

University of Oxford 5 100University of Manchester (Victoria) 43 100Imperial College of Science

Technology and Medicine 14 99

Cambridge University 6 99University of Nottingham 170 94University College London (UCL) 34 87King's College London (KCL) 96 81University of Leeds 133 75The University of Edinburgh 48 69University of Birmingham 126 64

MetricsResearch intensive

Masters1(medium)

Research extensive

Masters2 (small)

Student numbers 6000 23,000 10,000 2500

Full-time faculty 807 1495 2400 751

Pages viewed 847,969 110,327 1,225,400 66,500

% of pages that were articles 28% 25% 28% 19%

% of pages that were abstracts 13% 17% 11% 17%

Main subject by reading area Science Social ScienceMedical &

ScienceSocial Science

Top journal viewed PolymerEducation and Urban Society

The Lancet Oecologia

Article view time (seconds) 89 76 89 62

Abstract view time (seconds) 22 20 19 20

% of article/abstract viewed in the current year 18% 17% 19% 12%

% of article/abstract views that were 7 years old or more 15% 18% 12% 20%

Number of sessions conducted 117,332 11,552 203,376 6,781

Duration of sessions (seconds) 635 1,579 538 1401

% of sessions recording over 10 views in a session 18% 24% 14% 26%

% of sessions using menus 44% 30% 58% 29%

% of sessions using search engine 32% 55% 25% 60%

% of search sessions using advanced search option 25% 26% 56% 28%

% of session viewing 2 or more journal titles 50% 60% 42% 59%