User behaviour: searching for scholarly material using electronic resource discovery systems

This paper reports on user behaviour when interacting with various electronic resource discovery systems (ERDS) while searching for scholarly material. It focuses on the search strategies applied by 34 students and researchers in Business and Economics from three UK universities to find relevant information on a specified topic. The findings of the study are presented in relation to existing information-seeking models. Although there are a lot of similarities between existing models we have found some differences between those and our study. These are: the use of personal/social networks to develop keywords for the queries as well as obtaining relevant material, study participants very rarely applied only one search strategy but tended to carry out combined searches which vary depending on the user group, and participants used different means of storing material. We expect these findings to help shape a set of requirements for next generation information discovery provisions in academic libraries.