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Introduction
Many institutions offering graduate degrees are now requiring electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) from their successful degree candidates, replacing the paper versions required in the past. Many of these documents are deposited into institutional, consortial, or national repositories, from which they are available without a fee (sometimes after an embargo period). Open access ETDs may be indexed by their local institutions, by consortial, state, and national indexes, and/or by international collective indexes such as Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) (Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, 2012) and Open Access Theses and Dissertations (OATD) (Open Access Theses and Dissertations, 2013).
Usage patterns for digital collections such as ETDs are important because they allow managers to allocate resources more effectively toward making these collections easier to find and use. This study examines two research questions:
RQ1. How do users in different locations find the Auburn University ETDs (AUETDs) collection?
RQ2. Do users in different locations interact differently with the collection and, if so, how?
Literature review
Despite the wide-spread adoption of institutional and ETD repositories, there is a dearth of research on usage patterns for them. McKay's (2007) article on institutional repository users pointed out that this scarcity of end-user research resulted in a lack of knowledge about:
[...] whether [repository] users are local or from outside the hosting institution; whether they find the [repository] via the institutional homepage or via search engine referrals; [...] what kind of information they look for and use; [and] how they use the functionality offered by the [repository].
Schmitz (2008) noted the lack of available information about repository end-users in a report from the Council on Library and Information Resources. Bailey's (2011) bibliography of resources on institutional and ETD repositories further documented this lack. Both McKay and Schmitz suggested that it would be necessary to include studies of the use of other digital resources such as online encyclopedias, scholarly databases, and collections of digitized books if one wanted to get a fuller picture of repository end-users.
Tenopir and Rowlands (2007) showed that web search engines such as Google were used by researchers of all ages to find books. They found that students looking for articles preferred searching, while faculty preferred browsing and reference-chaining (sometimes called...