The Information Futures Commission is running an online survey called Outstanding! (What would that feel like?).
This 15-minute questionnaire asks students, staff and other scholars to describe, in their own words, how they find, use and share scholarly information.
In part, the survey was inspired by Danny Kingsley’s PhD research at the Australian National University. By surveying almost 300 academics Danny identified discipline-specific differences in how academics find and publish scholarly information.
The table below is based on my notes of a presentation given by Danny at the VALA 2008 conference. The full text of the refereed paper is available from the conference web site.
|
Behavior |
Chemist |
Sociologist |
Computer scientist |
|
Preferred mode of publication for own work (prestige, career development) |
Small number of refereed journals |
Books, monographs, some refereed journals |
Conference proceedings |
|
Undirected search (keeping up with my discipline) |
Regular systematic skimming of publishers’ alerts, newsfeeds, tables of contents |
Very little — prefer to rely on serendipity, personal collection of books and journals |
Attend specific conferences to gossip (not listen to presentations) |
|
Directed search (answering a specific question) |
Primarily via databases. Little use of public search engines (seen as low prestige) |
Snowball — a mix of texts and papers |
Google it, then link (or republish) from own web site, regardless of copyright |
Will we find similar patterns among students and academics at the University of Melbourne?
The Outstanding! survey will be online until Friday 9 May. It takes about 15 minutes to complete, and we’d love to hear your voice. What’s your experience of finding and using scholarly information?
If all the current barriers disappeared and you were working or studying in an ideal environment, what would that environment be like? How would it feel? How would you do things differently from today?