Google Scholar and academic library discovery systems are both popular resources among academic users for finding scholarly information. By conducting an online survey with 975 users from more than 20 public research universities across the United States, this study comparatively investigates how and why academic users use these two resources.…

Web-scale discovery services such as Summon (Serial Solutions), WorldCat Local (OCLC), EDS (EBSCO), and Primo (Ex Libris) are often touted as a single search solution to connect users to library-owned and -licensed content, improving discoverability and retrieval of resources. Assessing how well these systems achieve this goal can be challenging,…

Introduction: This study examines the effects of certain key factors on users' intention to ultimately adopt and use video digital libraries for facilitating their information needs. The individual factors identified for this study, based on their given potential to influence use and acceptance of video digital libraries, were categorised for data…

This dissertation examines the impact of exploration and learning upon eDiscovery information retrieval; it is written in three parts. Part I contains foundational concepts and background on the topics of information retrieval and eDiscovery. This part informs the reader about the research frameworks, methodologies, data collection, and…

Personal information management (PIM) is a research field that examines the activities by which users save, organize and retrieve personal information items. PIM is a one of the essential new literacies for learners in the 21st century. This paper reports results from a pilot study that explored PIM practices and strategies of K-12 students, on…

The moving image plays a significant role in teaching and learning; faculty in a variety of disciplines consider it a crucial component of their coursework. Yet little has been written about how faculty identify, obtain, and use these resources and what role the library plays. This study, which engaged teaching faculty in a dialogue with library…

In the last decade e-lecturing has become more and more popular. The amount of lecture video data on the "World Wide Web" (WWW) is growing rapidly. Therefore, a more efficient method for video retrieval in WWW or within large lecture video archives is urgently needed. This paper presents an approach for automated video indexing and video…

With the proliferation of social Web applications, users can now collaboratively author, share and access hypermedia learning resources, contributing to richer learning experiences outside formal education. These resources may or may not be educational. However, they can be harnessed for educational purposes by adapting and personalizing them to…

Introduction: Serendipitous information retrieval is the perhaps inevitable consequence of immersion in an information-rich environment. Just how well chance encounters are supported, however, within these environments varies and one of the challenges to the development of tools and systems to facilitate serendipity is measuring how well they…

Introduction: This paper reports an exploratory study examining how users participate in social tagging activities in a scholarly digital library environment to learn about their motivations, behaviour, and practices. Method: This study was conducted in two phases: a survey to investigate usage and attitudes of social tagging tool, and a…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of an empirical study of information behaviour of young Slovenian researchers. Design/methodology/approach: Built on some well-known models of scholarly information behaviour the study complements a previously conducted study of the same population, which focused on the aspects of user…

Hierarchical folders have been widely used for managing digital files. A well constructed hierarchical structure can keep files organized. A parent folder can have several subfolders and one subfolder can only reside in one parent folder. Files are stored in folders or subfolders. Files can be found by traversing a given path, going through…

The article proposes a self-study system which suggests web links to learners. The suggestions depend upon the learner's chosen competences selected from a competence structure for a particular knowledge domain. Three experiments were conducted, where the first compared the perceived usefulness and value of the links generated by different…

This study presents an empirical investigation of online hierarchical repositories of items presented to university students in Web-supported course websites, using Web mining methods. To this end, data from 1747 courses were collected, and the use of online repositories of content items in these courses was examined. At a later stage, courses…

Personalization of information retrieval tailors search towards individual users to meet their particular information needs by taking into account information about users and their contexts, often through implicit sources of evidence such as user behaviors and contextual factors. The current study looks particularly at users' dwelling behavior,…