Library user experience report: Removing barriers in the search for knowledge

Editor's Notes

• #2: My name is Jon Bentley – the commercial director for OpenAthens Really excited to have this opportunity to share some of the insight we gathered during a major piece of research with end users – people! – who use our services from around the world.
• #3: What I hope you will see from this webinar – is that wherever you are in the world, or universe, the challenges are similar – there may be some surprises, but I doubt it, there are certainly regional variations but you will see is similar themes – and from a fresh perspective.
• #5: As a community I often reference three major stakeholders – three really important groups involved in e-resource engagement – libraries, publishers and end users. Traditionally OpenAthens has focused on first two . in the last few years the community has been tested like never before as they adapted services to support learners and researchers working remotely and online. Learners and researchers have also had to adapt fast to keep their work on track. We wanted to understand the challenges users face when they search for resources online, how they manage these and what it means for their work when they have to compromise. We kicked this project off in 2021, when we commissioned consultancy firm Digirati to talk in depth to academic library users across the globe.
• #6: In early 2021, Digirati carried out semi-structured Zoom interviews with 15 researchers and 9 learners in Nigeria, the Philippines, Malaysia, India, Australia and the United States. We included research participants with and without support. Later that year, we followed up on Digirati’s qualitative research with a quantitative study that looked at the issues that have a negative impact on researchers and learners. We surveyed 174 respondents across the globe, using social media and direct mail to reach out to our target audience.
• #7: The researchers and learners in Digirati’s study face a multitude of challenges when looking for resources, and especially journal articles, online. Many of these challenges are common and widespread, but their severity varies from person to person depending on factors that include geographical location, the availability of quality support and career stage.
• #8: In the Digirati research, interviewees value journal articles highly, but said their access to them is hindered by factors that include: • Paywalls • Lack of guidance on how and where to search • Unreliable internet and/or power supplies Students and researchers who can’t get quick, easy access to online resources can’t do their best work or achieve their potential.
• #9: Access to journal articles frequently comes at a cost. Most students and researchers need journal articles to be free at the point of use and they believe this is an ethical issue as well as a practical one. Only students and researchers with the best financial support can routinely pay for articles. Even those who can pay are slowed down by the need to justify the cost. Sometimes, they are also frustrated about paying for something that looked promising from the abstract but proved not to be, after purchase. There are growing expectations that publicly funded research should be accessible to all. Publishers are increasingly responding to these expectations by adopting new content delivery models such as hybrid open access/subscribed content
• #10: Often, learners and researchers don’t know where to find resources. They say there’s too much available and it is too widely dispersed across the internet. The institutional library might seem the obvious first port of call, but for many it is not, either in person or remotely. In these cases, learners and researchers don’t make use of the curated, high-quality resources that their library subscribes to. Instead, they may devise their own, sub-optimal search methods.
• #11: Researchers worry about not being able to identify research gaps because resources are hard to discover or access. This is always detrimental and can be disastrous. A master’s candidate from Nigeria, with limited access to online resources, wrote a research paper only to find when he tried to publish that the research had been done a decade before. He is still trying to tweak his work to get it published. Now in Malaysia working on his PhD he said, “research here is easier. You get to be abreast of the latest information so you can think better”.
• #12: But it’s not enough to make all resources open access. Users still need help to spot quality and assess relevance even when they are well established in their academic careers. This can come in the form of guidance and training in research skills, as well as in use of platforms and tools.
• #13: The majority of our 174 survey participants were students (52%) or researchers (38%). The remaining 10% included a teacher, humanitarian, geologist, ‘employee’ and a librarian.
• #15: Researchers were less concerned than students about their research abilities. But they shared student’s worries about how to discover and access content and the negative impact on their work if they miss key resources. Students were mainly concerned about how to evaluate the quality of resources they find online and how to organize those resources.
• #16: At OpenAthens, we’d like to know more about the reasons for the different response rates. For example, have respondents in EMEA countries and the UK given research skills a high priority because they are a hot topic in the academic communities here? In Africa, does the lower priority suggest that learners and researchers have more pressing concerns, such as access to hardware or robust connectivity? Our researchers and learners all recognize that content is fundamental for their work. There are marked differences, however, in how they rated the impact of missing out on valuable resources. Our study involved quite small numbers of respondents, particularly in the EMEA region and South America. It would be useful to explore these differences further, with a larger cohort.
• #19: Academic libraries – and their librarians – have been under extreme pressure but their response to lockdowns has been incredible. They have digitized resources, implemented digital tools and devised click and collect schemes for library users. The majority of researchers and students now begin their discovery process outside the library. Comments from our qualitative research show that digital is often the preferred choice for students and researchers when they look for resources, and they often circumvent the library because they think there are faster, easier ways of getting what they need.
• #20: But the majority of researchers and students now begin their discovery process outside the library. Comments from our qualitative research show that digital is often the preferred choice for students and researchers when they look for resources, and they often circumvent the library because they think there are faster, easier ways of getting what they need. When students and researchers do turn to the library, often because they want access to a journal that’s behind a paywall, their experiences vary greatly. Some find a wealth of support while others find they wait several days for a response, or sometimes never get one at all.
• #21: Existing clunky processes make it hard for respondents to file and arrange their journal articles and managing this interferes with their thinking and writing. It is a significant problem. Online research becomes almost addictive, and students and researchers accumulate vast amounts of information simply because a lot of it is reasonably readily available. Numerous interviewees said they need smoother processes to store, retrieve and use articles they’ve accumulated:
• #23: In our poll, we want you to select your top 3 priorities for researchers and students.
• #25: If you haven’t already read it, please use the QR code to download a copy of our report for more details about our research.
• #28: Students need guidance and training in how to evaluate the resources they find, although not all receive it. Those who don’t have funds to pay for articles that are behind a paywall and can’t access them via the library, friends or study groups, are in particular need of help to evaluate journals before they pay up. Researchers also need support to identify the best journals in which to publish their own work. Open access isn’t the solution to this issue. If all journal articles were published in open access there would be even greater need for students and researchers to receive training and tools to help them evaluate online resources. When support isn’t readily available, researchers and students resort to a variety of methods to check the value of the resources they find. These include checking the credibility of the database, looking at the article’s ranking for impact and conducting Google searches. Others said they look to see if it is in the library, and if it’s there they consider it safe, which is a mark of the trust they implicitly have in their libraries. A few simply take a pragmatic approach.