Use of electronic monographs in the humanities and social sciences
| Published date | 01 December 2001 |
| Date | 01 December 2001 |
| Pages | 368-375 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/EUM0000000006541 |
| Author | Carol Ann Hughes,Nancy L. Buchanan |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Use of electronic
monographs in the
humanities and social
sciences
Carol Ann Hughes and
Nancy L. Buchanan
Introduction
Librarians have little information from user
studies in the print environment or from
analysis of existing library electronic resources
to assist them in planning for how users will
search and utilize a large corpus of scholarly
literature in electronic format, especially a
collection of online books. This article will
provide preliminary information about patterns
of access and use of electronic scholarly
monographs in the humanities and social
sciences provided by a newly launched
commercial online library collection,
Questia
SM
.
Efforts to develop a conceptual framework for
the evaluation of digital collections of textual
materials are just beginning. Some initial
studies have focused collection-based
evaluations of user success in identifying or
accessing online titles in the newer, Web-based
collections. For instance, Marchionini (2000)
found, in an evaluation of use of the Perseus
digital library, what he termed a ``mechanical
advantage'' to online libraries, in that ``students
found more unique citations when using
Perseus than not using it''. Unfortunately, there
was no evidence that the resulting essays were
better than those of peers who did not use the
Perseus library, although he made a strong case
for the potential enrichment of the learning
experience from the integration with text of
multimedia resources and other aspects of
digital study.
Other types of user studies have attempted to
study digital libraries from search and interface
aspects to establish whether searchers have
more success in searching with Web interfaces.
An exploratory study by Bell (1999) attempted
to understand whether the Web interface itself
provided special ``emotive'' support for
researchers not provided by other types of
interfaces that led to better quality in search
results. Although he found that the stress level
of searchers using a Web interface was lower,
search results were not improved through the
reduction of stress.
It is crucial for librarians to understand how
and why users, especially novice searchers, are
increasingly gravitating toward ``full-text
dependency'' on the World Wide Web
(MacDonald and Dunkelberger, 1998).
The authors
Carol Ann Hughes is Director, Collections Management at
Questia Media, Inc., Houston, Texas, USA. E-mail:
chughes@questia.com
Nancy L. Buchanan is Collection Management Librarian at
Questia Media, Inc., Houston, Texas, USA. E-mail:
nbuchanan@questia.com
Keywords
Electronic publishing, Experience, User studies,
Online retrieval, Social sciences
Abstract
This article provides preliminary information about patterns
of access and use of a collection of 35,000 electronic
scholarly monographs in the humanities and social sciences
provided by a commercial online library collection, Ques-
tia
SM
. Search logs and page view logs were analyzed as to
the characteristics of the search queries and browsing within
titles. Major findings include patterns of simple search
queries and significant access to a surprising breadth of
titles.
Electronic access
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The current issue and full text archive of this journal is
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368
Library Hi Tech
Volume 19 .Number 4 .2001 .pp. 368±375
#MCB University Press .ISSN 0737-8831
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