Knowledge about how users use digital libraries and their contents is inextricably tied to a library's ability to sustain itself, grow its services and meet the needs of its users. This paper reports on the preliminary results of a study of how science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) instructors perceive and use digital libraries. Preliminary findings indicate that: they do not differentiate between digital libraries and other kinds of content that comes from the web, they seek content to supplement traditional teaching methods and their reliance on Google and personal networks impedes their ability to recall the primary sources of useful content.
Theoretical approachUse of a particular type of technology or resource is notoriously difficult to study. There are many different dimensions to use, and this complexity cannot be captured using a single research method. We are using a multi-method approach that will allow us to triangulate our research methods and our sources of data. Our approach begins with qualitative focus groups of faculty. The protocol is designed to allow themes to emerge based on responses to questions regarding digital resource and digital library use. This will be followed by a large-scale quantitative survey to give us an over-arching picture and identify broad trends, but such an approach will give us few details of the mechanics of digital library use because answers will be limited by the nature of survey responses. The quantitative survey supplements the qualitative data from focus groups and interviews of faculty to describe the process whereby faculty come to use libraries and what they perceive the obstacles and opportunities to be. This can be correlated with observations on real behavior like those described in Manduca, et al.
Methodological ApproachTo grasp the full complexity of the nature of faculty use of digital libraries and to counter any potential weaknesses in any individual methodology, we will employ three different, yet complementary, methods to gather the data for this study.
In this paper, we describe the results of a national survey of higher education faculty concerning their use of digital resources and collections of these resources. We explore the differences in resource use by discipline groups and suggest implications for development of discipline specific libraries and faculty development practices.
In this paper, we report on the results of a national survey of faculty members concerning their use of digital resources (DRs), collections of resources and digital libraries (DLs). The research reported here explored issues such as: value of DRs, motivation for using DRs and barriers to use of these resources in teaching. The results have implications for how DLs might develop education and outreach efforts to increase visibility and use of their collections.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.