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This report covers the digital usage and information seeking behaviour of tens of thousands of business/economics/management students, researchers and academic staff.

Executive Summary

The intention was to inform and provide a context for the small-scale but detailed observational and interview studies undertaken by Middlesex University researchers for a JISC funded User Behaviour Observational Study (Business and Economics). Much of the data were mined from CIBER’s Virtual Scholar research programme and has not been previously published in this form. New data was also obtained from the studies CIBER are currently conducting, especially from the JISC national E-book Observatory project and the RIN funded E-journals study Log data, the main source of information on usage and information seeking, covers a period of more than five years and the questionnaire data represents more than 5000 people so this probably represents the biggest and most comprehensive usage data set ever assembled on the subject. E-books and e-journals are covered and usage at the three JISC User Behaviour Observational Study case study institutions – LSE, Middlesex and Cranfield, are highlighted A whole variety of analyses are featured including: volume and, patterns of use (in terms of visits and page views), dwell time (session and page times), type of content viewed (PDF, abstracts etc), number of pages viewed in a session, methods of navigating towards content, age of material viewed, and number of searches conducted, names of titles used, user’s organization, age and gender, hardcopy v digital preferences, viewing/reading behaviour.

The main findings are that Business/Economics students and academic staff use and seek information very much like their virtual colleagues in other subject fields. That is they make characteristically short visits, which see only a few pages and documents viewed; they like simple searching, use Google and GoogleScholar and like browsing when they get to a website; they appreciate searching off-site and outside the traditional (9-5) working day. E-textbooks are mainly used for obtaining snippets of information and fact finding. Power browsing of multiple e-text books is characteristic and there appears to be very little extended reading of e-books. Students are the majority users of digital information services, because there are simply many more of them – their use however is much lighter as they tend to view fewer pages. As with all subject fields, there are considerable institutional differences between the usage and information seeking behavior even within discipline, with those at research intensive institutions using the databases more – although spending less time on a visit, and using less of the functions on offer.

Economists/Business users are also distinctive in their use and information seeking and their key characteristics are:

1. they are heavier users of e-textbooks and e-books generally;
2. they tend to search off campus and out of office hours more (the fact that many are part-time provides part of the explanation);
3. their searches and visits are even more abbreviated than the virtual scholar norm – they are the archetypal ‘bouncers’;
4. Google and GoogleScholar are even more popular, as too is abstract viewing;
5. they have a marked preference for current material.

Of the three case study institutions LSE was clearly the super-user both in terms of e-books and e-jourmals, making more visits and viewing more pages. This is a characteristic of top-rated research driven universities[1] everywhere. However, abstract viewing was lowest at the LSE and highest at Cranfield.