Information Seeking within Academic Digital Libraries: A Survey of Graduate Student Search Strategies

When searching within an academic digital library, a variety of information seeking strategies may be employed. The purpose of this study is to determine whether graduate students choose appropriate information seeking strategies for the complexity of a given search scenario, and to explore among other factors that could influence their decisions. We used a survey method in which participants (n=33) were asked to recall their most recent instance of an academic digital library search session that matched two given scenarios (randomly chosen from four alternatives), and for each scenario identify whether they employed search strategies associated with four different information seeking models. Although we expected that the information seeking strategies used would be influenced by the search scenario, this was not the case. The factors that affected whether a participant would use an advanced information seeking strategy were based on their graduate-level academic search training and their primary research methodology. These findings highlight that while it is important to train graduate students on how to conduct academic digital library searches, more work is needed to train them on matching the information seeking strategies to the complexity of their search tasks and developing interfaces that guide their search process. CCS CONCEPTS • Information systems → Task models; Digital libraries and archives.