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Japanese Taskforce Looks at Use of E-Journals
In December 2003, the E-Journal Task Force of the Japan Association of National University Libraries released results of their "Survey of Current and Future Use of E-Journals at Universities" conducted in July 2003.
This survey investigates usage for e-journals in many of the largest national universities and analyzes trends in users' perceptions and attitudes towards e-journals in the past two years through comparisons with the findings from the previous survey in 2001.
The objective is to use the findings as the basis on which to develop e-journal collections and improve the use of e-journals at universities in the future.
3,750 randomly selected faculty members and graduate students from 13 national universities were asked to answer a questionnaire via their university libraries. Response rate was 43.2%.
The survey focused on user-awareness, as well as user-preferences with regard to full-text article format, use of Abstracting and Indexing databases, future use, remote access and the need for back files. Major findings are as follows:
- Results show a significant increase in the number of researchers and students using e-journals on a regular basis - from 37% in 2001 to 52% in 2003.
- PDF is the most preferred data format in which to access full-text articles, accounting for over 90%, with 60% citing "prints out neatly" as the top reason.
- Approximately 70% perceive that e-journals will be "absolutely necessary" for future research activities.
- 53.5% agree that they would very much like to access e-journals and databases from outside the university.
- 47% feel that 30 years or more of back files are needed.
Anyone interested in receiving more information about the survey should contact: Yoshito Itoh, The Chairman, E-Journal Task Force, Director, The Nagoya University Library, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, 464-8601, Japan 
Partners in Development: Scopus Makes Connections Through User-Centered Design
Amy Knapp
Librarians are well aware that as the rate of information dissemination continues to explode, scientists and researchers increasingly require easy access to an ever-expanding world of resources in order to accomplish their work. Researchers use scientific information to develop research agendas, stay current with developments in their own and related fields, work collaboratively within their own institutions and with colleagues around the world, critically analyze the work of others, and to contribute to their teaching efforts. They expect the systems that serve them to be readily accessible (on campus and remotely), reliable and comprehensive. Most importantly, they expect them to be intuitive and easy to use, such that little or no assistance with searching is required.
So, the challenge for librarians is to find an information system that is robust enough to provide researchers access to the universe of resources, while also being designed with the expectations of independent users in mind. Designing a system that makes finding relevant information quick and easy requires a detailed understanding of how researchers approach an information retrieval task, of the steps they follow to locate and evaluate information. Gaining this sort of understanding of research behavior is not an easy task and one that cannot be done in isolation. Building a bibliographic system which users will be able to rely on and use efficiently on their own requires partnership between information system developers, librarians and the researchers themselves.
Approximately two years ago, the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh became a development partner with Elsevier to work on a product called Scopus. The goal of this partnership is to work collaboratively to develop a bibliographic and navigation system to meet the information retrieval needs of researchers at academic institutions worldwide. The University Library System of Pittsburgh was just one of 21 research institutions worldwide participating in multiple rounds of on-site and remote testing of various concepts and functional prototypes of the system. At the outset, our role and benefits for our library were probably not as clear as they’ve become. We were anxious to partner in developing a research tool that we could provide to our users, but I don’t think we had any notion of the additional knowledge we’d gain through this project.
What did we as a library get from this partnership? Well, part of my role has been to work as the liaison between Elsevier and the University Library System, identifying people for user studies and librarians for small focus groups, as well as working with our systems people to involve them in the process. It’s been an interesting experience for us, and it’s also given me an opportunity to work closely with end users who’ve been involved in this product, and to get a good sense from them of what they’re looking for. I’ve gained a much better understanding of how researchers work online, how they evaluate information, and what our users are looking for from their library in what has become an increasingly online, remote environment.
The model developed for the creation of this information system — referred to as “user-centered design” — seems to have worked very well, and has been a positive experience for all involved. The verbal and behavioral feedback from user test sessions has built up a detailed understanding of scientists’ information needs, tasks and workflow. This understanding has formed and is forming the fundamental basis for content, functionality and design decisions for the Scopus system. As user feedback was built into new versions of the system, users involved in tests could see their suggestions coming alive, and I think this gave them a very real sense of connection with the process. Comments such as “Wow, they really listened to me… Wow, they really incorporated my ideas,” have not been infrequent.
We’ve also gained insight into how researchers approach information retrieval tasks. Results of the user studies indicated many users approach tasks in the same fundamental ways. In general, we found the preferred behavior of most researchers seems to be to start broadly, review the set retrieved, and then refine. We’ve found researchers want to use a system like Scopus to:
- Find new articles in their disciplines or subject fields
- Find author-related information — articles by a specific author or related to the author, or information to help evaluate an author
- Stay up-to-date — what’s new since their last search, what might be relevant
- Get an overview of a new subject field — who are the important authors, journals, institutions/research groups.
A tremendous amount of information on user behavior has been gathered during the course of Scopus’ development. Some observations may not seem particularly surprising to those of us who have worked closely with researchers in libraries, but what is really significant is that this information is being used to create a system designed to meet the information retrieval needs of these researchers.
Personally, this experience has given me a greater appreciation for the complexity of the job of creating a database that does what users want. My hope is that this knowledge of users’ motivations and online work habits will contribute to an increased awareness of researchers’ information retrieval preferences, both in our library and at Elsevier.
After all, the more we know about how our users approach and solve information tasks the better able we are to help them. This has become especially important now, when increasingly we don’t often meet these users face-to-face in a physical library.
