While it is satisfying to know that the number of undergraduates (freshmen and seniors, according to the report) who report using library websites _daily_ has gone from 7% to 17% in just three years, it's also rather baffling. The choices in the survey instrument were: Never, Once per year, Once per quarter or semester, Monthly, Weekly, Several times per week, and Daily; so when students selected "Daily" they presumably meant "Daily." My sense is that undergraduates are driven to use library resources principally by course requirements, so I would be curious whether the proportion of class readings accessible via library websites (and linked from syllabi) has similarly increased. I can't think of anything else that would increase _daily_ use to such an extent.
Ed Jones
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of B.G. Sloan
Sent: Monday, October 26, 2009 11:01 AM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: [NGC4LIB] Daily use of library web resources by students
Here's one finding from Educause's "Students and Information Technology" report that seems to run counter to some of the discussions on this list:
"...the percentage of students who reported using the library website daily has increased from 7.1% in 2006 to 16.9% in 2009."
There are people (including me) who think that libraries will increasingly lose relevance in an age of seemingly ubiquitous information sources, and yet the percentage of students who use library web resources on a daily basis has more than doubled in three years.
Bernie Sloan
Received on Mon Oct 26 2009 - 15:19:25 EDT