Dear All

Please see the below from Jenny about the research she has been sent by the listservs I posted on. We received a fantastic response. Her contact details are at the bottom of the email:

Thank you to everyone who responded to my email. The purpose of my query was to see if there was any published literature/studies on differences between usage of the library by discipline.

Anecdotally our feeling is that science and engineering students may use the library less than perhaps their arts and social science peers due to a number of factors: more reliance on journals than books, which predominantly are now available electronically, higher timetabled hours resulting in less time to spend in the library, possibly more directed reading in terms of books, shorter reading lists etc.  This is the reason why we are trialling a library student ambassador project aimed specifically at science and engineering students to make sure that the library is engaging with these students, whether this be physical visits or ensuring that they are using the appropriate electronic resources.  There are therefore 2 aspects of this: the physical use of the library and also electronic behaviour.

I got a lot of interesting replies.  Many people agreeing that anecdotally they feel that science and engineering students probably borrow less material but are still heavy users of the library for many other purposes.  There is also big difference between disciplines, e.g. maths students borrowing less in general due to the nature of their work than pharmacy students for example.

Interestingly a recent article in the Times Higher states that: "Students on arts and humanities courses were among the least likely to spend 5 or more hours per week in the library, with just 30 per cent doing so.  Meanwhile, 34 per cent of science and engineering students spent that amount of time there, 40 per cent of business students, and for law undergraduates the figure rose to 49 per cent."

Grove, Jack.  (2012) More debt, more paid work, more pressure...less alcohol. Times Higher Education, 8 March 2012, p. 11.

I know a lot of people were interest in this topic so I have listed below some of the references and studies that people pointed out to me regarding library use by discipline.

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Studies/data
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Library Impact Data Project (http://library.hud.ac.uk/blogs/projects/lidp/)  that looked at the correlation between library usage and level of degree awarded. You can download their open data (http://library.hud.ac.uk/blogs/projects/lidp/open-data/) which includes course name

Buskoven (2005) from Statistics Norway  provides tabular data on student use of academic and public libraries  by main field of study http://www.ssb.no/emner/07/02/30/rapp_200614/rapp_200614.pdf
(In Norwegian)

What students really read? a study based on lending data across the University of Toulouse For further :
http://bibliotheques.univ-toulouse.fr/fichiers/pratiques-de-lecture-resume.pdf
http://bibliotheques.univ-toulouse.fr/fichiers/universite-de-toulouse-pratiques-de-lecture-des-etudiants.pdf
(abstract in English.  Full-text in French)

ARL's LibQUAL+(r) survey might be of help.
Two of the questions that might help are how often information resources are used on the library's premises and how often they are used through the library's websites. This data can be broken down by discipline (Engineering, Science, Humanities, Business, Education, etc.). There is a data set of all participating ARL libraries that can be used

University of Queensland study looking at library use by different disciplinary cohorts, but the main focus was on the nature of the library spaces ("traditional" or "next-generation").
http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:157791 .

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Publications
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Information seeking behavior engineers and law students in Ireland http://informationr.net/ir/10-1/paper208.html

Information Seeking Behavior of Students of Engineering Colleges in and Around Coimbatore: A Study http://www.eurojournals.com/EJSR_61_2_08.pdf

Steve Hiller
How Different Are They? A Comparison By Academic Area Of Library Use, Priorities, and Information Needs at the University of Washington Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship Winter 2002 :

http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA252066
NASA/DoD Aerospace Knowledge Diffusion Research Project. Report Number 6. The Relationship between the Use of U.S. Government Technical Reports by U.S. Aerospace Engineers and Scientists and Selected Institutional and Sociometric Variables

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0740818897900244
Scholars and the use of the internet

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0306457386900282
End-user information-seeking in the energy field: Implications for end-user access to DOE/RECON databases

http://siba.unipv.it/fisica/articoli/articoli/Journal%20of%20the%20American%20Society%20for%20Information%20Science%20and%20Technology_vol.50_no.10_1999_pp.929-943.pdf
Information Seeking Behavior of Scientists in the Electronic Information Age: Astronomers, Chemists, Mathematicians, and Physicists

http://units.sla.org/division/dst/Annual%20Conference%20Contributed%20Papers/2008papers/Buxton.pdf
Outreach to Scientists and Engineers at the Hanford Technical Library

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=324828
Requirements engineering by example: an empirical study

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306457306001919
Engineers and the Web: An analysis of real life gaps in information usage

http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/10900
Studies on use of library collections by scientists, engineers and technicians

http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1529598&show=abstract
Lessons learned from analyzing library database usage data

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0923474801000327
An investigation of factors affecting how engineers and scientists seek information

http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=864058&show=abstract
Modelling the information seeking patterns of engineers and research scientists in an industrial environment

Report by Housewright and Schonfeld entitled Ithaka's
2006 Studies of Key Stakeholders in the digital Transformation in Higher Education available  from Ithaka website States that scientists and engineers are often ahead of other disciplines in desiring change and that role of the library is diminishing in importance fastest amongst those involved in the science and engineering disciplines.

Assessing Information-Seeking Behavior of Computer Science and Engineering Faculty http://www.istl.org/11-winter/refereed5.html

Tenopir and King's 2004 IEEE text
Communication Patterns of Engineers
Hardcover ISBN
0-471-48492-X.

Title: "What engineering sophomore students know and would like to know about engineering information sources and access."
ISTL (2009): http://www.istl.org/09-spring/refereed3.html

Impact of Surfing on Reading Habits- A case study of the Students of Kashmir Valley (PhD) Fayaz Ahmad Lone

How College Students Manage Technology While in the Library ...projectinfolit.org/pdfs/PIL_Fall2011_TechStudy_FullReport1.1.pdf

Use and Users of Electronic Library resources:www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub120/pub120.pdf
Student Characteristics and Use of Library Services in the University ...unllib.unl.edu/LPP/omehia-obi-okon.htm

Many thanks
Jenny

Jenny Coombs
University of Nottingham
Email: Jenny.Coombs@nottingham.ac.uk

Kind regards

Louise
Louise Peck BSc LM DipM MCIM, Library Marketing Specialist
Royal Society of Chemistry, Thomas Graham House,
Science Park, Cambridge, CB4 0WF, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 1223 432669, Fax: +44 (0) 1223 420247
www.rsc.org/publishing
peckl@rsc.org

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