* ISSUE: KIDS TAKE THE EASIEST PATH - GOOGLE/WIKIPEDIA

21C. BEHAVIOURS: horizontal, bouncing, checking and viewing

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

The information literacy of young people, has not
improved with the widening access to technology:
in fact, their apparent facility with computers
disguises some worrying problems

• internet research shows that the speed of young
people’s web searching means that little time is
spent in evaluating information, either for
relevance, accuracy or authority

• young people have a poor understanding of their
information needs and thus find it difficult to
develop effective search strategies

• as a result, they exhibit a strong preference for
expressing themselves in natural language rather
than analysing which key words might be more
effective

• faced with a long list of search hits, young people
find it difficult to assess the relevance of the
materials presented and often print off pages with
no more than a perfunctory glance at them
These points relate both to the current use of the
internet by young people and, a technology
generation earlier, to their use of early online systems
and CDROMs. There is little direct evidence that
young people’s information literacy is any better or
worse than before. However, the ubiquitous use of
highly branded search engines raises other issues

• young people have unsophisticated mental maps of
what the internet is, often failing to appreciate that
it is a collection of networked resources from
different providers

• as a result, the search engine, be that Yahoo or
Google, becomes the primary brand that they
associate with the internet

• many young people do not find library-sponsored
resources intuitive and therefore prefer to use
Google or Yahoo instead: these offer a familiar, if
simplistic solution, for their study needs

21C. BEHAVIOURS: horizontal, bouncing, checking and viewing

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

The information literacy of young people, has not
improved with the widening access to technology:
in fact, their apparent facility with computers
disguises some worrying problems

• internet research shows that the speed of young
people’s web searching means that little time is
spent in evaluating information, either for
relevance, accuracy or authority

• young people have a poor understanding of their
information needs and thus find it difficult to
develop effective search strategies

• as a result, they exhibit a strong preference for
expressing themselves in natural language rather
than analysing which key words might be more
effective

• faced with a long list of search hits, young people
find it difficult to assess the relevance of the
materials presented and often print off pages with
no more than a perfunctory glance at them
These points relate both to the current use of the
internet by young people and, a technology
generation earlier, to their use of early online systems
and CDROMs. There is little direct evidence that
young people’s information literacy is any better or
worse than before. However, the ubiquitous use of
highly branded search engines raises other issues

• young people have unsophisticated mental maps of
what the internet is, often failing to appreciate that
it is a collection of networked resources from
different providers

• as a result, the search engine, be that Yahoo or
Google, becomes the primary brand that they
associate with the internet

• many young people do not find library-sponsored
resources intuitive and therefore prefer to use
Google or Yahoo instead: these offer a familiar, if
simplistic solution, for their study needs

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