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Higher Education student pathways to ebook usage and engagement, and understanding: Highways and cul de sacs

Casselden, B; Pears, Richard

Higher Education student pathways to ebook usage and engagement, and understanding: Highways and cul de sacs Thumbnail


Authors

B Casselden



Abstract

Ebooks have enthusiastically been adopted by academic libraries, viewed as a golden bullet by library professionals, resulting in efficient resource use, space saving, student satisfaction and accommodating millennial generation study habits. A small-scale online survey undertaken at Northumbria and Durham Universities investigated students’ ebook use, examining aspects of learning ebooks support, searching strategies, devices used for ebook access, and reading and use strategies. Ninety-two responses were analysed using a mixed methods approach. Despite many advantages of ebooks including portability, availability, functionality and searching, results, demonstrated sentiment regarding ebooks was not wholly positive. There were frustrations regarding the complexity of ebook provision, publisher’s restrictions and the lack of compatibility with reading devices. A key finding related to ebook interrogation which involved greater targeted searching of content and a ‘bite-size’ approach to reading. Caution must be observed to ensure that library collections facilitate a complexity of learning styles, and provide opportunities for students to better digest content.

Citation

Casselden, B., & Pears, R. (2020). Higher Education student pathways to ebook usage and engagement, and understanding: Highways and cul de sacs. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 52(2), 601-619. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961000619841429

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Mar 13, 2019
Online Publication Date Apr 16, 2019
Publication Date Jun 1, 2020
Deposit Date Mar 13, 2019
Publicly Available Date Apr 16, 2019
Journal Journal of Librarianship and Information Science
Print ISSN 0961-0006
Electronic ISSN 1741-6477
Publisher SAGE Publications
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 52
Issue 2
Pages 601-619
DOI https://doi.org/10.1177/0961000619841429
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1335806
Related Public URLs http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/38381

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Accepted Journal Article (1.5 Mb)
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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).






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