Engaging with scholarly digital libraries (publisher platforms): the extent to which "added-value" functions are used

Abstract

The third paper to emanate from Ciber's Virtual Scholar research programme, which looks at the information seeking behaviour of academics and researchers in regard to digital journal libraries (publisher platforms). This paper concentrates on the users and usage of Blackwell Synergy's "added-value" functionality. Nearly a million users, making 10 million item requests were investigated employing deep log methods, developed by the authors to provide robust and big picture analyses of digital information consumers and their behaviour. Through such methods usage data has been embellished with user data (for 500,000 people), so enabling comparisons to be made between the information seeking behaviour, for instance, of students and staff, academics and practitioners. We believe this is the first time this type of analysis has been attempted with logs. In this paper we concentrate on those things that users do in a digital library that goes beyond simple use and browsing (constructing interest profiles, employing pop-ups, requesting articles by email and using the search engine). This tells us something about how strongly the users engage or interact with the digital library by benefiting from or exploiting all its functions and whether it is cost effective for publishers to provide, what appears to be a never-ending number of facilities.