Difficulties with academic writing tasks, such as the literature review, impact students' timely completion of graduate degrees. A better understanding of graduate students' perceptions of writing the literature review could enable supervisors, administrators, service providers, and graduate students themselves to overcome these difficulties. This…

This article presents the results of a study of academic e-books that compared the metadata and search results from major academic e-book platforms. The authors collected data and performed a series of test searches designed to produce the same result regardless of platform. Testing, however, revealed metadata-related errors and significant…

This mixed-method study examines the effectiveness of teaching Google search techniques (GSTs) to Korean EFL college students in an intermediate-level academic English writing course. 18 students participated in a 4-day GST workshop consisting of an overview session of the web as corpus and Google as a concordancer, and three training sessions…

This report presents findings about the challenges today's college freshmen face, and the information-seeking strategies they develop, use, and adapt as they make the transition from high school to college and begin to complete college-level research assignments. Included are data from a comparative analysis of library resources in 30 US high…

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…

Introduction: The paper presents original research designed to explore and compare selected aspects of the information seeking behaviour of mathematicians (scientists and students) on the Internet. Method: The data were gathered through a questionnaire distributed at the end of 2011 and in January 2012. Twenty-nine professional mathematicians and…

Three-quarters of Advanced Placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) teachers say that the internet and digital search tools have had a "mostly positive" impact on their students' research habits, but 87% say these technologies are creating an "easily distracted generation with short attention spans" and 64% say today's digital…

Despite a large increase in the number of students enrolled in online courses, published research on student experiences in these environments is minimal. This article reports the narrative analysis of a series of interviews conducted with a female student at a brick-and-mortar school enrolled in a single virtual school course. Her narratives…

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…

Distance education created new challenges regarding the delivery of large size isochronous continuous streaming media (SM) objects. In this paper, we consider the design of a framework for customized SM presentations, where each presentation consists of a number of SM objects that should be retrieved and displayed to the user in a coherent…

Reports findings of a study in four Nova Scotia public schools of twelfth grade students' information seeking strategies when using the Internet as an information source. Discusses student's knowledge of World Wide Web search engines; how students acquired Internet information seeking knowledge; and how students perceive their ability to locate…

This paper reports the findings of a study undertaken in four Nova Scotia public schools of twelfth grade students' information seeking strategies when they use the Internet as an information source. Various Nova Scotia Department of Education curriculum documents hold high expectations of students' information seeking strategies when using the…