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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, Questia(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.
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...