The User Behaviour in Resource Discovery project has come to its end. The team led by Professor William Wong with members Researcher Dr Hanna Stelmaszewska (EIS), Ms Nazlin Bhimani (Library Resources), Mr Sukhbinder Barn (MDX Business School), Professor Balbir Barn (EIS) have successfully completed their work investigating information seeking behaviour of students and researchers from Business and Economics study.

The key findings are:

(i) users used both those subscribed by the library and those freely available on the Internet,

(ii) when the level of information literacy and the domain knowledge increase the tendency of using library resources,

(iii) PG and Experts used EBSCO, ProQuest or Emerald whereas Library Catalogue and federated search engines were more popular amongst UG,

(iv) users found databases structure hinder, complex and difficult to use,

(v) users very rarely applied only one search (e.g. Simple Search) instead they carried out combined searchers (e.g. Re-formulated Search, Link Search, System Suggestion),

(vi) current systems do not provide ‘seamless’ transition between these searchers making the search and retrieval process difficult and time consuming,

(vii) the groups we studied used different means of storing the material (e.g. copy & paste into Word, save in a folder, bookmark, tabs and more sophisticated features provided by various system such as RefWorks, Endnotes, My Research),

(viii) the current systems lack good ways of storing and retrieving documents that can be accessed easily and transferable across different resources.

Please click the link to open the UBiRD Report