CIL2008: What Do Users Really Do in Their Native Habitat?

Pascal Lupien, University of Guelph
Randy Oldham, University of Guelph
John Law, ProQuest

Lupien and Oldham reported on a study they had done on students at the University of Guelph. They did an online survey followed by a series of focus groups. They wanted to test out whether the general characteristics of "millennials" as reported in the literature applied to their constituents. Some key findings ...

• 69% of student respondents owned a cell phone. Of those that did, 79% use their phones for text messaging but only 17% had ever browsed the Internet from their cell phone and only 6% had played a video on their cell phone.
• 64% used online social networks frequently but only 15% of them had used them often for academic project work. Students prefer to use online social networks for social purposes and email to communicate with group project members.
  
• 68% of students said they seldom or never played online games. Only 2% used Second Life or other virtual worlds frequently.
• When asked an open-ended question about the first place they go to find information and sources for research assignments, the most frequent answer was the library or library web site. Students seem to realize that the library has the best information for research projects, but it is also the most complicated and frustrating option.

Law reported on an ethnographic study that had been conducted observing students in their native environment. They used Facebook to recruit students with actual class assignments requiring research. They arranged to monitor the students during a 90-minute research session in the library, computer labs, coffee shops, and apartments. They collected 60 of these sessions using UserVue to capture the sessions remotely.

They asked students how they chose the resources they used. Answers were library outreach, course instructor recommendation, and brand awareness. (They observed a student doing biology research who spent his entire 90-minute session in JSTOR. When asked why, he said that his English 101 instructor had said JSTOR was a good resource to do research.)

How students used library resources:

• vast majority of participants _attempted_ to use library resources for their research
• once in a licensed product, most students have no serious difficulties in conducting their research
• often work with multiple resources and search tools at same time
• abstracts are used

The inhibitors to success were

• lack of awareness of appropriate resources
  
• difficulty of navigating library website to locate e-resources
• search catalog front and center, for articles
• authentication barriers

How students really use Google

• primary research tool - sufficing, when quality isn't a concern; insufficiently aware of library e-resources; bad experiences with library e-resources
• supplement research
• handy look-ups - locate known resources; get specific answers

Students were pretty smart about using different resource tools for different purposes.