College and Research Libraries
January 2007, Vol. 68, No. 1
Abstracts
Information-Seeking Behavior of International Graduate Students vs. American Graduate Students: A User Study at Virginia Tech 2005
Yan Liao, Mary Finn, and Jun Lu
PDF version
This is a comparative study on information needs and information-seeking behavior of international graduate students and American graduate students. This user study is based on empirical data collected from an online survey conducted between April 7 and May 28, 2005, at Virginia Tech. The goal of this comparative study is to investigate how graduate students from diverse ethnic groups discover, select, and use various information sources and to obtain insights into international graduate students’ information-seeking behavior, especially its similarities and differences compared with the information-locating patterns used by their American peers.
Measurement of Use of Electronic Resources: Advances in Use Statistics and Innovations in Resource Functionality
Deborah D. Blecic, Joan B. Fiscella, and Stephen E. Wiberley, Jr.
PDF version
The ICOLC guidelines and Project COUNTER codes of practice have advanced the measurement of use of electronic resources. At the same time, innovations in functionality within and among electronic resources are changing the environment in which use is measured. The present article explores measures of sessions and searches for one research library’s electronic resources. The article analyzes the transition from vendor-specific to COUNTER-compliant statistics, how vendors measure the running of search alerts, and the effects of federated searching on reported use. The analysis suggests that innovations in functionality may have changed the meaning of sessions and searches. The analysis also suggests the following principle: innovations in electronic resource functionality will necessitate advances in electronic resource usage measures to describe use meaningfully.
Accessing E-books through Academic Library Web Sites
Andrea Dinkelman and Kristine Stacy-Bates
PDF version
This article examines access to electronic books as provided on the Web sites of academic libraries in the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Our goal was to discover the ways in which that access occurs and to analyze the merit of the various approaches. We found some common barriers to access, as well as many cases of exemplary access. Many libraries could improve access to e-books by providing guidance to the content of e-book packages, by including the word "book" in links from the homepage to the pages that provide e-books, by providing a one-step limit to e-books in the catalog, by explaining which types of resources are available through search structures outside the catalog, and by featuring e-books in library publicity and instruction.
Charting Academic Library Staffing:Data from National Surveys
Rachel Applegate
PDF version
Many issues in academic library practice and research are affected by staffing patterns. To provide an overview of librarian distribution among large, medium, and small institutions, librarian to nonlibrarian ratios, and ratios of library staff to students and faculty, a database comprising 1,380 four-year nonspecialized U.S. academic institutions was constructed. Among other findings, these descriptive data show that academic librarians are distributed bimodally, with a few large libraries employing about half of all academic librarians. Findings concerning librarians, institutions, and staffing ratios by library size, Carnegie classification, and control are presented.
Subject Headings in Full-Text Environments: The ECCO Experiment
Jeffrey Garrett
PDF version
Bibliographic records regularly combine two incommensurable types of description: one that captures the physical and textual facts of a work, the other that seeks to encompass succinctly the work’s intellectual content. This article deals with the second type of bibliographic description: subject headings and their contribution to resource discovery. The article reports on an experiment at Northwestern University Library to add subject headings to online records for the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). The author assesses the benefits of this enhancement by using a representative research topic: a search for contemporary material on the East India Company (1600–1873). This article extends arguments recently presented by Gross and Taylor (2005) in two directions: first, by considering the importance of subject headings for access to historical materials; and, second, by examining the value added by subject headings even when the full text of a work is available online.