This article details an open card sort study administered to undergraduate students, graduate students, and librarians at the University of Colorado at Boulder in order to reveal perceptions of library research guides. The study identifies user group preferences for organization and content of research guides, as well as themes emerging from the…

The self-service nature of today's society means that technical communicators are needed more than ever before since users may find themselves struggling to make sense of online documentation with minimal support from the institutions that provide it. Certain demographics within the user population (older adults, disabled persons, non-native…

The study investigated the information seeking behaviour of two categories of distance learners in Botswana, comprising the cross-border students and those that registered with the University of Botswana. The return of 364 duly completed questionnaires recorded 70.1 percent response rate. Cross tabulation and chi-square were made to relate the…

Network security is a large and complex problem being addressed by multiple communities. Nevertheless, current theories in networking security appear to overestimate network administrators' ability to understand network access control lists (NACLs), providing few context specific user analyses. Consequently, the current research generally seems to…

The purpose of this study was to explore the valuation process of community college library end-users as they decide which information resources to use when conducting research. This study was designed as an exploratory study using Q methodology and focused on five specific information resources that community college library end-users routinely…

Focused on community colleges in North Carolina participating in the Scholars of Global Distinction initiative, the goal of this article is to assist librarians in their efforts to thoughtfully increase global and area studies online resources available at their libraries. Through this article, the author hopes to increase global library resources…

This study analyzed the relationships among factors predicting online university students' actual usage of a mobile learning management system (m-LMS) through a structural model. Data from 222 students in a Korean online university were collected to investigate integrated relationships among their perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness,…

This dissertation examines the impact of internet technologies on the field of health communication. Access and use of health communication technologies has and will continue to become increasingly important to manage and treat chronic conditions and other ailments, particularly in the context of health care reform that promotes improved quality…

The contributions in this volume represent a decade of OCLC's user behavior research findings that articulate the need for the design of future library services to be all about the user. Highlights include: (1) People associate the library with books and do not consider the library in relation to online resources or reference services; (2) People…

The University of Denver's Penrose Library saw a substantial increase in use as a result of several new and enhanced services over a six-year period. In turn, longer operating hours and increased staffing for a 24-hours-a-day, five-days-a-week (24 x 5) operating schedule was funded. This case study analyzes student need for longer library hours…

Usability testing on library search tools was conducted with ten students and eighteen library staff members at Syracuse University. The study addressed three research questions: (1) Do the ways in which librarians carry out search tasks on the library Web site vary from those of student users?; (2) Are those variations indicative of different…

As technology continues to advance, libraries in Europe and America continue to improve upon their virtual reference services by employing new Web technologies and applying them to existing services. West African academic libraries have begun providing resources electronically to their users but still typically lag behind in the services they…

Family day-care (FDC) educators work autonomously to provide care and education for children of mixed ages, backgrounds and abilities. To meet the demands and opportunities of their work and regulatory requirements, educators need access to context-relevant and high quality information. No previous research has examined how and where these workers…

The potential of wikis for learning has recently begun to capture the attention of English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL) research. While students' collaboration, attention to form, and perceptions of wikis in document mode have been widely addressed in previous research, the educational value of wikis used in thread mode, as discussion…

Background/Context: A thorough understanding of the information-seeking behaviors of specific disciplines, as well as distinct user groups within a discipline, is fundamental to the process of development of disciplinary informatics. Significant research has been conducted, largely by library and information science scholars across a range of…