Library metrics – studying academic users’ information retrieval behavior: A case study of an Israeli university library

Greenberg, Riki; Bar‐Ilan, Judit

doi:10.1177/0961000616640031

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…Since its inception, the appearance of the Google homepage has been consistently simple and plain. One aspect of this is the single search bar, which library discovery tools have begun to adopt (Georgas, 2014;Greenberg and Bar-Ilan, 2017). Another aspect is that there is less to distract people from their search, unlike some of the competing search engines (for example Bing) which include news articles, images and website links on their homepage.…”

Section: Questions For Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Weaving through the web

Bailey¹,

Bowley²,

Withers³

2020

Understanding Contemporary Issues in Higher Education

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Section: Questions For Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Google Scholar's usefulness is dependent on the library catalogue, as it carries out the role of a meta-search engine. Students may not be aware that it is linking to sources subscribed to by their institution and that they would not be able to access these sources otherwise (Greenberg and Bar-Ilan, 2017).…”

Section: Questions For Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Weaving through the web

Bailey¹,

Bowley²,

Withers³

2020

Understanding Contemporary Issues in Higher Education

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“…Although maintaining article level linking can be a relatively simple process for packages and consortial purchases, configuring and maintaining link resolver information for a multitude of individual journal titles can be time consuming and labour intensive. Past research provides evidence that a high percentage of journal usage originates outside of link resolver pathways (Greenberg & Bar-Ilan, 2017), so it is important to examine the impact of article level linking to determine whether efforts to maintain link resolver information for individual titles are worthwhile.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Connecting Users to Articles: An Analysis of the Impact of Article Level Linking on Journal Use Statistics

Swab¹

2019

EBLIP

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Abstract Objective – Electronic resource management challenges and “big deal” cancellations at one Canadian university library contributed to a situation where a number of electronic journal subscriptions at the university’s health sciences library lacked article level linking. The aim of this study was to compare the usage of journals with article level linking enabled to journals where only journal level linking was available or enabled. Methods – A list of electronic journal title subscriptions was generated from vendor and subscription agent invoices. Journal titles were eligible for inclusion if the subscription was available throughout 2018 on the publisher’s platform, if the subscription costs were fully funded by the health sciences library, and if management of the subscription required title-by-title intervention by library staff. Of the 356 journal titles considered, 302 were included in the study. Negative binomial regression was performed to determine the effect of journal vs. article level linking on total COUNTER Journal Report 1 (JR1) successful full-text article requests for 2018, controlling for journal publisher, subject area, journal ranking, and alternate aggregator access. Results – The negative binomial regression model demonstrated that article level linking had a significant, positive effect on total 2018 JR1 (coef: 0.645; p < 0.001). Article level linking increased the expected total JR1 by 90.7% when compared to journals where article level linking was not available or enabled. Differences in predicted usage between journals with article level linking and those without article level linking remained significant at various journal ranking levels. This suggests that usage of both smaller, more specialized journals (e.g., Journal of Vascular Research) and larger, general journals (e.g., New England Journal of Medicine) increases when article level linking is enabled. Conclusions – This study provides statistical evidence that enabling article level linking has a positive impact on journal usage at one academic health sciences library. Although further study is needed, academic libraries should consider enabling article level linking wherever possible in order to facilitate user access, maximize the value of journal subscriptions, and improve convenience for users.

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“…Scarnò’s major takeaway was that users prefer the simple search and that they tend to repeat the previously used search action (with some refinement). Greenberg and Bar-Ilan (2017) examined log files, reports, and publishers’ counts to investigate library users’ information retrieval behavior in the process of discovering scholarly information including six major expectations of users as they search for research materials. Authors mentioned that “libraries and library services are perceived as complicated, while other sources (such as Google) are easy to use” (p. 455).…”

Section: On the Present Situationmentioning

confidence: 99%

To pre-filter, or not to pre-filter, that is the query: A multi-campus big data study

Cribbs

Gardner

2022

Journal of Librarianship and Information Science

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Library discovery platforms, which provide searchable user interfaces as their front-facing layer, aggregate tremendous amounts of metadata from multiple data streams describing a wide variety of print and electronic resources. Complicating the matter further, resources may differ in availability or delivery time depending not only on their media but also upon the source of the data stream describing them. How should libraries structure end users’ options for searching discovery platforms in light of the many options available? This study used a nonexperimental design and quantitative methods to analyze users’ revealed preferences for query type in twenty-four academic libraries in a data set containing metadata, sans queries, for over 64 million searches. Libraries studied were all located in California, used the same discovery layer software, and served similar user and faculty constituencies; however, the number of query types and pre-filtering options available differed between institutions. Results show that, when users were presented with the choice between search options, most conducted simple, more broad searches rather than complex and specific searches. When search options were highly constrained by the default choice architecture, but complex searches were possible, few users opted out of the default simple search. Implications for usability of discovery layers and the motivations of librarians in choice architecture are nontrivial and are discussed. The desires of librarians and “power user” faculty must be balanced with the fact that most users are novices and users of all abilities are largely habituated to commercial search products which emphasize post-search results filtering.

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Library metrics – studying academic users’ information retrieval behavior: A case study of an Israeli university library

Cited by 6 publications

References 38 publications

Weaving through the web

Weaving through the web

Connecting Users to Articles: An Analysis of the Impact of Article Level Linking on Journal Use Statistics

To pre-filter, or not to pre-filter, that is the query: A multi-campus big data study

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