The study presents data from a survey of 1099 students at 4-year colleges and universities in the USA about their use of the library eBook collection. The 90-page study gives detailed data on which students use the eBook collection, how important the collection is to them, how they evaluate its ease of use, and how do they assess the information literacy training that they have received in its use. The report also gives data on the extent of use of webinars, videos, classes, website instructions and other means for educating students about the use of the academic library eBook collection.
Data in the report is presented in the aggregate and then broken out separately for sixteen different variables including but not limited to: college grades, gender, income level, year of college standing, SAT/ACT scores, regional origin, age, sexual orientation, race & ethnicity, college major and other personal variables, and by Carnegie class, enrollment size and public/private status of the survey participants institutions of higher education.
Just a few of the report’s many findings are that:
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48.13% of students sampled had never used their academic library eBook collection
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The higher a student’s grades, the more likely they were to believe that the library eBook collection was easy to use.
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Nearly 13% of students sampled had watched an online video on how to use their academic library’s eBook collection.
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More than 65% of students studying the social sciences rated the library eBook collection as useful to them to any degree, the highest among any subject category in the sample.