d E-Books?Do We Need E-Books?
The Problem
—With growing number of distance education students, access to online library resources is critical. —Distance education students have access to many journals. —They have access to 10,912 electronic books available to our students and faculty through NetLibrary. —Most of these books are in the Library Catalog. —Yet the books appear to have been used little since 2000, when we got the books.
Number of Uses of NetLibrary E-books, SOSU, 1999-2007
| Year |
Accesses |
| 1999-2000 |
23 |
| 2000-2001 |
17 |
| 2001-2002 |
265 |
| 2002-2003 |
187 |
| 2003-2004 |
250 |
| 2004-2005 |
188 |
| 2005-2006 |
333 |
| 2006-2007 |
231 |
| Total |
1494 |
The Next Step
—To find out why the usage was appearantely so low, if was determined that the students at SOSU must be asked about their use of our NetLibrary E-Books collection. Also to see if our usage was really low, other libraries that have NetLibrary collections of e-books needed to be asked about their usage of that collection.
SOSU Student Usage of E-Books
In April 2007 a survey on usage of e-books was given to 3000 students of Southeastern Oklahoma State Universitywho had access to Blackboard. The survey was administered on Blackboard, and all students who had access to Blackboard also had access to the survey. The survey was available the entire month of April 2007. Here are the results of the survey.
Results of Survey
The first four questions dealt with age, status, sex, and where the student was taking classes.
Question 5: I currently spend about ______hours on the Internet every week.
62.7 said that they spend between 5 to 20 hours a week on the Internet with 16% spending between 20 to 40 hours a week on the Internet, with a small minority, 4.5% spending more than 40 hours a week on the Internet. Also a fairly small minority 16% spend less than four hours a week on the Internet. But no students surveyed indicated that they spend no time on the Internet. All indicated that they spend at least 1 hour a week on the Internet.
Questions 6-13
I currently spend about _________hours a week:
|
|
0
|
More than 0
|
1 to 2
|
3 to 4
|
5-6
|
7-10
|
11-15
|
16-20
|
21-30
|
More than 30
|
Uns
|
|
e-mail
|
0
|
15.819
|
44.633
|
17.514
|
4.52
|
9.04
|
3.955
|
2.26
|
1.13
|
1.13
|
0
|
|
MySpace
|
48.023
|
11.864
|
11.864
|
12.429
|
6.78
|
3.955
|
1.695
|
0
|
1.695
|
1.13
|
0.565
|
|
Chat rooms
|
92.09
|
4.52
|
1.13
|
2.26
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
|
Blackboard
|
7.91
|
14.689
|
24.294
|
22.034
|
10.734
|
8.475
|
3.955
|
3.39
|
2.26
|
2.26
|
0
|
|
Research for college
|
4.52
|
9.605
|
27.684
|
25.989
|
13.559
|
9.605
|
4.52
|
1.695
|
2.26
|
0.565
|
0
|
|
Downloading files
|
13.559
|
36.158
|
27.684
|
12.994
|
3.955
|
2.825
|
1.13
|
0
|
0
|
0.565
|
1.13
|
|
Playing games
|
61.017
|
14.689
|
11.864
|
5.085
|
2.26
|
1.695
|
1.13
|
0.565
|
0.565
|
0.565
|
0.565
|
|
Surfing
|
22.034
|
26.554
|
25.554
|
11.299
|
6.215
|
2.825
|
1.695
|
1.695
|
0
|
0
|
1.13
|
Internet Use by SOSU students: It doesn’t appear that SOSU students spend hours upon hours on the Internet. 78% of students surveyed indicated that they spend less than 4 hours a week doing e-mail and 84% spend less than 4 hours on social networking sites such as Myspace, with 48% indicating that they spend no time on these sites. Also 92% indicated that they spend no time on chat rooms.
When it comes to doing school work, they don’t appear to spend much time either. 80% said that they spend less that 6 hours a week on the Internet logged into their Internet (Blackboard) classes and 81% said that they spend less than 6 hours a week on the Internet doing research for their college classes.
Being on the Internet for fun: 49.7% said that they are on the Internet downloading files for less than one hour and when you add another hour and go to less than 2 hours the number jumps to 77%. 88% said that they spend less than 2 hours a week playing games and 75% spend less than 2 hours a week surfing the Internet.
These questions indicate the kinds of things that students are doing on the Internet, but it does not indicate how much time students spend on the Internet relative to other things that they do in college or other aspects of their lives. It doesn’t indicate how much time they spend on the Internet relative to watching TV, or reading.
—Question 14: Have you read, accessed or used an e-book?
—32.7% answered yes and 67.2 answered no.
—Question 15 Why haven’t you used an e-book?
—Top three responses:
—Have no reason to/haven’t needed to or not been required 37%
—Don’t know what a e-books are or never heard of them 24%
—Prefer paper books-prefer to read in paper 7%
—Question 16 What would motivate you to read e-books?
—Top three motivations:
—
—
- If I had to use for a class/class assignment
- Ease of access, more convienient
- Knowing more about them and the benefits of them
—
24. How much of an e-book have you read?
8% said that they have read all of an e-book. 37.9% said that they have done something with an e-book, even if it was only to look at the front cover.
25. I would probably use an e-book for my class assignments if I knew where to find them.
—This question was asked to see if not knowing where e-books were located was a big problem. 80% agreed or strongly agreed with this statement, indicating that there are a lot of students who don’t know where to find them.
29. If you encountered a record of an e-book in the catalog, what did you do then?
—This question was aimed at finding out what students did when they encountered an e-book record, and only 18.7% indicated that they did anything with the e-book when they found one. 50% said that they skipped the record when they found out that it was an e-book. This answer is as expected. So having e-books in the catalog does not seem to make students who find them use them.
—There is no data on the usage of e-books before they were put into the catalog. —31% didn’t answer this question. This should have been higher, so there may be some that actually didn’t access an e-book in the catalog who answered that they skipped it. But clearly, most students skip an e-book when found in the catalog.
Conclusions of Survey
—Faculty input is vital to get students to use E-books
—More advertising of e-books is essential to get students to use them
Survey of NetLibrary Libraries
—
In Aug-Sept 2007 a survey on usage of e-books was sent to libraries via various library listservs. There were 45 that answered at least some of the survey. Here are the results of the survey:
—
Question Two: question asked how many e-books the library had
This question asked how many total e-books that you have access to or own through NetLibrary? There were 43 libraries that answered this question. The top number of e-books was 95,000 and the least was 200. The average number of e-books from the 43 libraries that answered this question was 25,519.6. SOSU, with 10,912 e-books was well below this average.
Question Three: the number of accesses
The statistical unit of measuer in NetLibrary is the access. What this means exactly is unknown This question asked how many accesses did you have during the period from July 1, 2006 through June 30, 2007. 42 libraries answered this question. The most accesses for a library was 18,000, and the least was 75. The average number of accesses was 3,803 for the 42 libraries. With 231 accesses in FY 2006-07, SOSU was again way below average.
Percentage of collection accessed
—This figure is important because of bigger collections potentially will yield a higher number of accesses.
—This figure will take out differences in size of the collection. —This figure ranged from 0% to 384% (the number of accesses was greater than the size of the collection). —Average % of the collection accessed of those surveyed was 15%. SOSU's percentage of collection accessed was 2.12%, again far below average.
Number of e-books per student
Range was from 0.021 books per student to 33.5 books per student. Average was 6.5 books per student. SOSU was 3.4 books per student
Number of access per student
Range was from 0.032 accesses per student to 2.91. Average was 0.76 accesses per student. SOSU's was 0.058 accesses per student
Conclusions and Recommendations
Faculty input is vital to get students to use E-books
- More advertising of e-books is essential to get students to use them
- More research is needed to look at libraries that have NetLibrary e-books AND other vendors at the same time
- Look into updating our collection or looking into different vendors.
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