Electronic Book Usage at a Master's Level I University: A Longitudinal Study

How E-books Are Used

“…Comparing e-book usage of titles in the Netlibrary collection at Auburn University Montgomery with the reported usage from eight larger research universities, Bailey found literature and social sciences to rank consistently among the most highly active disciplines. 40 Yet at least in part this seems to reflect the fact that these disciplines are heavily book-dependent, so that their members are simply more likely to be dealing with many more books relative to other disciplines in the first place. When one goes beyond the raw numbers to consider what researchers in these fields actually do with e-books, the picture becomes less clear.…”

How Do We Study Satisfaction With Academic E‐Book Collections?

“…Some studies simply extrapolated acceptance or satisfaction from usage data: if statistics show that a title has been used, or that usage of a collection increased over time, then the e-book format was at least accepted by their user community. In Timothy Bailey's (2006) article "Electronic Book Usage at a Master's Level I University: A Longitudinal Study," he reviews changing usage patterns in NetLibrary usage over a span of several years, and concludes, "The ever increasing amount of use demonstrated by the statistical reports available from NetLibrary indicates the acceptance of remotely accessible monographs by the AUM Library's patrons." Usage statistics are thereby used as a metric for acceptance: the researchers show that these people have used e-books or that collection usage has increased, and they extrapolate that to mean that they liked them.…”

E‐books in practice: the librarian's perspective

“…7 A number of studies have been launched in the information sciences to determine usage behaviour and the acceptance of e-books in a university environment. [8][9][10] Case study: e-books in the Central Library of Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany Forschungszentrum Jülich (Research Centre Jülich) is the largest interdisciplinary research centre in Europe. Its 4,400 staff members address key questions in the fields of energy, environment, key technologies, and medicine.…”