Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Keynote address: Involving the customer in library planning and decision making
- 3 Denmark's Electronic Research Library: evaluation of services through user surveys and usability tests
- 4 Beyond the guidelines: assessment of the usability and accessibility of distributed services from the users’ perspective
- 5 Online services versus online chaos: evaluating online services in a Greek academic library
- 6 The Hellenic Academic Libraries Consortium (HEAL-Link) and its effect on library services in Greece: the case of Aristotle University library system
- 7 Information seeking in large-scale resource discovery environments: users and union catalogues
- 8 A ‘joined-up’ electronic journal service: user attitudes and behaviour
- 9 Climbing the ladders and sidestepping the snakes: achieving accessibility through a co-ordinated and strategic approach
- 10 The impact of library and information services on health professionals’ ability to locate information for patient care
- 11 We know we are making a difference but can we prove it? Impact measurement in a higher education library
- 12 Proving our worth? Measuring the impact of the public library service in the UK
- 13 Outcomes and impacts, dollars and sense: are libraries measuring up?
- 14 Longitude II: assessing the value and impact of library services over time
- 15 The use of electronic journals in academic libraries in Castilla y León
- 16 The integration of library activities in the academic world: a practitioner's view
- 17 Monitoring PULMAN's Oeiras Manifesto Action Plan
- 18 Enabling the library in university systems: trial and evaluation in the use of library services away from the library
- 19 Towards an integrated theory of digital library success from the users’ perspective
- 20 The role of digital libraries in helping students attend to source information
- 21 A DiVA for every audience: lessons learned from the evaluation of an online digital video library
- 22 Usability evaluation of Ebrary and OverDrive e-book online systems
- 23 Tearing down the walls: demand for e-books in an academic library
- Index
8 - A ‘joined-up’ electronic journal service: user attitudes and behaviour
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 June 2018
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Keynote address: Involving the customer in library planning and decision making
- 3 Denmark's Electronic Research Library: evaluation of services through user surveys and usability tests
- 4 Beyond the guidelines: assessment of the usability and accessibility of distributed services from the users’ perspective
- 5 Online services versus online chaos: evaluating online services in a Greek academic library
- 6 The Hellenic Academic Libraries Consortium (HEAL-Link) and its effect on library services in Greece: the case of Aristotle University library system
- 7 Information seeking in large-scale resource discovery environments: users and union catalogues
- 8 A ‘joined-up’ electronic journal service: user attitudes and behaviour
- 9 Climbing the ladders and sidestepping the snakes: achieving accessibility through a co-ordinated and strategic approach
- 10 The impact of library and information services on health professionals’ ability to locate information for patient care
- 11 We know we are making a difference but can we prove it? Impact measurement in a higher education library
- 12 Proving our worth? Measuring the impact of the public library service in the UK
- 13 Outcomes and impacts, dollars and sense: are libraries measuring up?
- 14 Longitude II: assessing the value and impact of library services over time
- 15 The use of electronic journals in academic libraries in Castilla y León
- 16 The integration of library activities in the academic world: a practitioner's view
- 17 Monitoring PULMAN's Oeiras Manifesto Action Plan
- 18 Enabling the library in university systems: trial and evaluation in the use of library services away from the library
- 19 Towards an integrated theory of digital library success from the users’ perspective
- 20 The role of digital libraries in helping students attend to source information
- 21 A DiVA for every audience: lessons learned from the evaluation of an online digital video library
- 22 Usability evaluation of Ebrary and OverDrive e-book online systems
- 23 Tearing down the walls: demand for e-books in an academic library
- Index
Summary
From attitudes to usage
This paper is an exploration of what happens when a service is provided that users have said they want. We have been able to study users who have the opportunity to go seamlessly from electronic discovery of an article title to its full electronic text, an opportunity many of them had been asking for. We might expect that, where attitudes are positive, there would be a rapid take-up of the service. However, attitude research has consistently found that a positive attitude does not necessarily translate into action. In the information systems domain we could hypothesize, for example, that there are many barriers that might prevent usage developing.
A model of user behaviour that has stimulated much user attitude research in relation to the use of information systems is the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) (Davies, 1993). This relatively simple model depicts attitudes towards using a service as the product of perceived benefits (the ‘pull’) and perceived ease of use (the barriers to use). Many attitude surveys have been inspired by the TAM. For example, studies of user attitudes to internet shopping have demonstrated that perceived benefits are tempered by concerns over the trust users can have in handing over financial information.
TAM researchers have focused on the factors that affect attitudes, rather than the usage patterns that result. They have not looked at what gets used and how usage develops over time, but we know from many studies that use of a service is often very selective. A study of branch banking staff, for example, found that most clerks used only five of the 36 features of a service that gave them access to information in a customer's account (Eason, 1984). Similarly, a study of the use of telephone #* services showed that users typically used only one or two of the many services available (Eason and Damodaran, 1986). Why do users select some features and ignore others? We have had an opportunity to follow the attitudes and usage patterns of the users of a major bibliographic record system over a fouryear period. As a result, we have been able to follow the way attitudes have translated into behaviour and the factors that have influenced this translation.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Libraries Without Walls 6Evaluating the Distributed Delivery of Library Services, pp. 63 - 70Publisher: FacetPrint publication year: 2006