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Many department faculty and students, research librarians and assistants, and so on, have done research on what resources university students utilize when doing research for school. Just some of these findings are relayed as follows.
In January through April of 2002, sixteen university students, eight of whom were graduate level students, participated in an exploratory study of how university students perceive and interact with Web search engines compared to Web-based online public access catalogues or OPACS (Fast and Campbell, 2002, 3).
The results retrieved in this study reveal that a large portion of the participants admired how OPACS are organized and knew that the documents retrieved within these catalogues is trustworthy. However, they preferred to use the Web search engines and were confident in their ability to recognize valid sources. Google is perceived as an easy option that produces immediate results, while OPACS are seen as a delay and requiring much more skills in order to achieve desired results (Fast and Campbell, 2002, 7-8).Also in 2002, a usability case study was performed in order to determine whether or not internet search engines influence the way students search library web pages. The results show that users had difficulty navigating the library databases, determining proper formats of resources or subjects to search for, and understanding certain library jargon (Augustine and Greene, 2002, 359-364). A number of studies done in 2005 through 2007 make it clear, again, that there is trouble for users when it comes to understanding library terminology and so these kinds of interactions with the language, database knowledge and scope, etc become less important and users largely seek efficiency (Griffiths, 2005, p. 541).
Research in 2007 shows that there is a strong notion of the fact that libraries are a very strong and deeply rooted feature of academia and because they will remain that way librarians and developers need to strike a balance between the younger, up-and-coming generation�s world of fast and easy technology and traditional library research methods and systems. One researcher states, "Young people expect instant gratification and experimentation, and this often leads to complaints about services, including libraries, with an expectation of immediate feedback. Students, like the public as a whole, have an increasing tendency to feel no embarrassment about sharing their spur-of-the- moment feelings and views; hence, the popularity of blogs, wikis, Facebook, You Tube and Second Life, and it can easily spill over into their dealings with their university library" (Sykes, 2007, p. 24). In the article, "Data, Data Everywhere, and How Do You Sort Through It?", the author notes that Google is the preferred tool among students when doing research for school and that libraries need to update their interfaces to compete with this trend among students. Libraries will then be able to easily compete with Google and other similar search engines.� (Baule, 2007, p. 54-6).
In 2009, in a research study of Bachelor of Business Studies distance learning students in the Quinn School of Business at University College Dublin, researchers found that Web-based searches were the most popular. Overall students voiced their need for easy and fast results, as the library and it�s databases seems like a more daunting experience. Ultimately, this trend of user-friendliness as a necessity is a trend throughout the last decade of research when it comes to university students being able to utilize library databases and the great wealth of scholarly and accurate knowledge they hold.
It seems as though libraries need to supply the demand of their university students, but there must also be an effort on behalf of students to understand and make sense of basic library tools if they want to maximize their research results.
Revised: 5/30/10