source at bottom
"Users are promiscuous, diverse and volatile."
Horizontal information seeking
A form of skimming activity, where people view just one or two pages from an academic site and then `bounce’ out, perhaps never to return. The figures are instructive:
around 60 per cent of e-journal users view no more than three pages and a majority (up to 65 per cent) never return.Navigation
People in virtual libraries spend a lot of time simply
finding their way around: in fact they spend as much time
finding their bearings as actually viewing what they find.
Viewers
The average times that users spend on e-book and e-
journal sites are very short: typically four and eight
minutes respectively. It is clear that users are not reading
online in the traditional sense, indeed there are signs that
new forms of `reading’ are emerging as users `power
browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and
abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they
go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.Squirreling behaviour
Academic users have strong consumer instincts and
research shows that they will squirrel away content in the
form of downloads, especially when there are free offers.
In spite of this behaviour and the very short session
times that we witness, there is no evidence as to the
extent to which these downloads are actually read.Diverse information seekers
Log analysis reveals that user behaviour is very diverse:
geographical location, gender, type of university and
status are all powerful consumer demographics. One
size does not fit all.Checking information seekers
Users assess authority and trust for themselves in a
matter of seconds by dipping and cross-checking across
different sites and by relying on favoured brands (e.g.
Google).
QUOTE FROM:
Information behavior of the researcher of the future
Conducted for the British Library and JISC , this report focuses on information seeking behavior of students born after 1993 (the Google Generation). Listen to presentation given and Q&A's when the paper was released on January 16, 2008.
photo: ardanea@morguefile
