Understanding Information Behaviour: How Do Students and Faculty Find Books?

Faculty and students at University College London (UCL) were polled online in November 2006 as part of a wider investigation into the impact of e-books in UK higher education. One of the survey questions probed the strategies that members of the academic community use to identify the conventional printed books that they need for work, study, or leisure. This article reports on a quasi-experimental statistical investigation of the survey findings for this single question. Multivariate data analysis suggests that book discovery is very highly structured, with gender, subject discipline, and academic status offering powerful predictors of certain underlying behavioural strategies. A model of book discovery strategies is developed and this is used to help segment the survey population into those with high or low levels of dependence on formal library systems or nonlibrary-based solutions. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the practical implications of these findings for librarians, publishers, and booksellers.