Transcript What is beyond books and journals? Pointers from CIBER’s Virtual Scholar programme David Nicholas CIBER UCL Centre for Publishing, Department of Information Studies University College London http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/research/ciber/

What is beyond books and journals?
Pointers from CIBER’s Virtual Scholar programme
David Nicholas
CIBER
UCL Centre for Publishing,
Department of Information Studies
University College London
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/research/ciber/
Two bits of information to get you thinking
• An internet year is only 7 weeks
• The biggest users of the House of Commons intranet are
robots - by miles, and there are pages that only robots
ever go to
• What is the significance of this? By the end of the talk
you will be able to answer this!
Pointers come from the straight from the
horse’s mouth, millions of horses
• 8 years of collecting digital fingerprints of millions of scholars
(students, kids, academic researchers, lecturers, general public)
from all over the world and every field under the sun
• Users of following: ScienceDirect, Oxford Journals, Synergy, BL
Learn, Intute, OhioLink, Oxford Scholarship Online,
MyiLibrary, Wiley Interscience, IoP Journals, NHS Direct
Online, Times Online, Independent Online etc
• Be a mug to ignore this evidence…there are plenty of mugs…
• The evidence is that the what lies beyond books and journals
has to be (user-facing and informed) e-book and journal services!
• The pointers are:
Pointer 1: E-journals & books are VERY popular –
don’t forget this
• Hugely popular and escalating demand
– Everything offered used
– Vast amounts of use – millions &
millions of pages viewed and millions of
visits made. Numbers astonishing.
– Double digit levels of growth - despite
wall-gardened systems
– Plenty of growth in system (millions of
people still like to use but cannot) and
products can be improved (more later)
– Good for you – high consumption levels
lead to very positive outcomes.
– Watch fireworks with e-books - will lead
to new and closer relationship between
books and journals which will power both
to new heights (OUP)
Pointer 2: big growth from e-books – don’t forget have
only seen phase 1 of the digital transition
• Offer condensed, distilled knowledge
– big demand; inappropriate use of
journals
• Textbook access particular big issue
with students - unblock the blockage!
• Under-utilised resource because
contents not digitally visible, now
accessible, roads and motorways
built, suitable for power browsing
• Bait of abstract and keyword, raises
to the prominence (digital visibility)
enjoyed by e-journals
• Students, humanities scholars and
general public can join the erevolution, enter the virtual scholarly
space.
Pointer 3: there are other attractions…think
reliability, quality and brand
• Journals and books have a high degree of visibility
and recognition
• People know what they are shopping for and
getting
• Links nicely and strongly to brand and authority
(quality products)
• Business class product
• In an anonymous, confused and crowded
environment pretty important to recognise this
Pointer 4: twin pillars of scholarly communication
doing well, thanks to digital transition
• Where the dangers and opportunities lie exist not in new systems,
social networking etc but understanding what has happened to
scholars as being fast forwarded into the virtual scholarly space
• We now know more about how people use and seek for books and
journals than we ever did and need to make this work for us – and
we don’t!
• Each new system, new diversion risks further disconnecting from
the customer base – they have become anonymous
• The most important things we need to understand, stick on the
back of the door follow
Pointer 5: Information seeking is fast, direct
and highly pragmatic…forget notions of quiet
contemplation, disciplined reading
• Most users visit for only a few minutes, and view only a
couple of pages.
• Opposite of fast-bag drop, fast-bag pick-up
• The don’t want to hang around! In and out
• Help them speed through the site, save time.
• There is nothing wrong with that
Pointer 6: they like it short
• Shorter it is the more likely it is to be read online
• If its long, either read the abstract or squirrel it
away for a day when it might not be read (digital
osmosis)
• People actually prefer abstracts much of the time,
even when given the choice
• Go online to avoid reading
Pointer 7: they like it simple – but publishers and
librarians seem to think otherwise!
• Users by-pass carefully-crafted discovery systems. Killer
stats (1): 4 months after SD content was opened to Google, a
third of traffic to physics journals came that way. Effect is
particularly notable since physics richly endowed with
information systems and services; (2) Historians biggest
users of Google, together with young people
• While Google searching hugely popular, once users enter a
site browse rather than search again using internal search
engine (don’t trust it, too complicated).
• Advanced search used rarely, and hardly at all by users in
highly-rated research institutions.Add-ons and innovations
distinctly a minority sport – email alerts, VLEs, blogs
Pointer 8: they do it all the time – this is a
solid and undisputable outcome
• Logs fantastic for discovering exactly when scholars search
• Use well into the night and over the weekend
• Quarter of use occurs outside the ‘traditional’ working day and
weekends account for around 15% of use (another working day!)
• Some things never change - Lunch time still the busiest time
and Monday lunchtimes the busiest of all (e-shopping)
• October the busiest month
• Government researchers don’t search weekends or in the
evenings!
• Economists most likely to work out of hours and life scientists
the least
Pointer 9: want ‘immersive’ social information
environments but few people listening!
• Said something which threw us all initially - they could not
understand why they had to do all the work in getting
something from the website. At first this was attributed to
laziness but it turned out not to be that. They felt the content
was locked, submerged and they had to dig a lot to see it, when
maybe the service could make some things available
automatically – the data coming to them, rather than having to
chase it.
• Returned book trolley! Come on guys wake up, stop chasing
FaceBook the lessons to be learnt are in your own backyard
Pointer 10: Diversity rules OK!
• Subject: Life Scientists insatiable
• Type of organisation: government labs
and universities in same subject exhibit
very different information behaviour.
• Research-intensive universities: behave
very differently
– Per capita use is highest in most
research-intensive institutions
– Users spend much less time on visit
– Forsake most of the online facilities
provided
– More likely to enter via gateway sites
• Searching: Germans most ‘successful’
searchers & most active information
seekers.
• Age: older users more likely to come
back, and view abstracts. Young people
use Google more, spend more time online
viewing. Staff v student use
Pointer 11: need to relate/information seeking
to establish outcomes
• Lets use the data for purposes other than measuring
activity
• Public good does not wash anymore (those warm
feelings)
• Access no longer an outcome
• Better students, degrees, researchers, more funding etc
• Cost-effectiveness – the car park question
• Which leads us to our RIN research
Lessons
• Business class services
• It works but could work better – more immersive, more
community, more outcomes
• Don’t complicate things, don’t get hung up on models,
just watch and react to the consumer. Turn that
information seeking data to gold
• Identify best practice, benchmark (digital literacy)
• Fast food
• The only new thing I think will work is data
• Back to the initial questions…answers, please!
More…
•http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/index.shtml