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

Abstract

Much of the existing literature on patron satisfaction with e-books in academic settings does not differentiate between platforms, formats, and other conditions that drastically change the user's ability to read, annotate, and use e-book content. The Charlotte Initiative is a project funded by the Mellon Foundation to convene a working group that investigates principles for permanent acquisition of e-books for academic libraries. As part of this project, a user experience research team has been created to review the existing literature on patron satisfaction with multiple aspects of e-books. During summer 2015, this research team began a metastudy to determine areas of the user experience with e-books in academic libraries that have been studied comprehensively and to identify areas that have not received formal evaluation. In this paper, we not only convey the results of our research team's literature review but also provide criteria that librarians and institutions can use to guide assessments of user experience with e-books in academic library settings.

Post-Acquisition Management and the Issue of Inaccessibility

“…Though the project is hosted by J. Murrey Atkins Library at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC Charlotte), it involves nearly 70 librarians, publishers, and consultants from universities throughout the United States and Canada. The user experience (UX) research team, focused on here, has thus far conducted a literature review (Caruso & Bradley, 2015) and has begun user studies of various e-book platforms. The literature review showed that many e-book studies lack specificity in noting the platforms studied, that they attempted to suggest ease of use by way of statistics, and that e-books and the platforms that host them are frustrating and not user friendly.…”