Telephone interviews were conducted with 18 blind academic library users around the United States about their experiences using their library and its website. The study uses the perspective that blind users' insights are fundamental. A common theme was that navigating a webpage is time consuming on the first visit. Issues identified include the…

Students more and more have access to online recordings of the lectures they attend at universities. The volume and length of these recorded lectures however make them difficult to navigate. Research shows that students primarily watch the recorded lectures while preparing for their exams. They do watch the full recorded lectures, but review only…

Federated searching was once touted as the library world's answer to Google, but ten years since federated searching technology's inception, how does it actually compare? This study focuses on undergraduate student preferences and perceptions when doing research using both Google and a federated search tool. Students were asked about their…

Senior citizens are comparatively vulnerable in accessing learning opportunities offered on the Internet due to usability problems in current web design. In an effort to build a senior-friendly learning web as a part of the Life-long Learning Network in Shanghai, usability studies of two websites currently available to Shanghai senior citizens…

PubMed® is an on-line literature database hosted by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Containing over 21 million citations for biomedical literature--both abstracts and full text--in the areas of the life sciences, behavioral studies, chemistry, and bioengineering, PubMed® represents an important tool for researchers. PubMed® searches return…

This article features the University of Liverpool's arts and humanities library, which applies a new search tool to improve the user experience. In nearly every way imaginable, the Sydney Jones Library and the Harold Cohen Library--the university's two libraries that serve science, engineering, and medical students--support the lives of their…

Individuals in contact with the criminal justice system are a key population of concern to public health. Record linkage studies can be useful for studying health outcomes for this group, but the use of aliases complicates the process of linking records across databases. This study was undertaken to determine the impact of aliases on sensitivity…

Libraries spend countless hours developing websites to connect users and resources. However, how much do we really know about what website terminology and features are meaningful to our patrons? And how can we best organize websites to facilitate access to resources? This article examines these questions by presenting a case study of a…

This paper reports on a guided navigation system built on the textbook search engine developed at Anadolu University to support distance education students. The search engine uses Turkish Language specific language processing modules to enable searches over course material presented in Open Education Faculty textbooks. We implemented a guided…

Researchers at American University investigated user preferences for discovery layer features, interface design, and content. They tested local implementations of WorldCat Local and Aquabrowser by conducting a group test with eighteen students and individual tests with ten students. Students searched a given question and a topic of their choosing…

Purpose: This study is an attempt to develop an automatic identification method for Arabic web queries and divide them into several query types using data mining. In addition, it seeks to evaluate the impact of the academic environment on using the internet. Design/methodology/approach: The web log files were collected from one of the higher…

Discovery tools are the next phase of library search systems. Illinois State University's Milner Library implemented EBSCO Discovery Service in August 2010. The authors conducted usability studies on the system in the fall of 2010. The aims of the study were twofold: first, to determine how Milner users set about using the system in order to…

The present study targeted the online reading strategies of upper-elementary and middle school students with and without learning disabilities in the U.S. and in Taiwan. Several aspects of the comprehension process were studied, including: (1) Internet navigation strategies and behaviours, (2) sensitivity to the organisational structure of…

This study investigates the relationships between the use of a zoom tool, the terms they supply to describe the image, and the type of image being viewed. Participants were assigned to two groups, one with access to the tool and one without, and were asked to supply terms to describe forty images, divided into four categories: landscape, portrait,…

An unprecedented amount of information encompassing almost every facet of human activities across the world is generated daily in the form of zeros and ones, and that is often the only form in which such information is recorded. A good fraction of this information needs to be preserved for periods of time ranging from a few years to centuries.…