Findings: British Library Scholarship Survey Provides Look at How Library Users Engage with BL’s Digital Content

From the British Library Digital Scholarship Blog:

Our Digital Scholarship team has recently conducted a survey aimed to collect data from BL users around awareness and adoption of digital tools and content in their research practice. A total of 1,649 participants took part in the survey helping us to have a clear insight into current digital research trends and determine which BL digital content, tools and services need to be prioritised and made more accessible across collections in response to the needs and expectations of our users.
Findings from survey show that users see the BL as playing a very important role in Digital Scholarship. Level of satisfaction with BL digital content and services are high but they could be further improved by the implementation of services that would allow users to:
i. have remote access to more BL digital content
ii. access content from their own devices
iii. use digital cameras in reading rooms for research purpose
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Printed sources are still the most common medium for publication among respondents. There seems to be a low awareness of institutional repositories as many respondents don’t know whether their publication is available via a digital repository.
Despite the increasing number of users accessing digital resources, it seems that a large proportion of researchers are not taking full advantage of digital tools when working with electronic data as they are approaching this type of content in the same way that they would access analogue resources. Use of digital tools to analyse digital information (e.g. data wrangling, textual and data analysis, etc.) is still relatively low among respondents.
[Clip]
Printed sources are still the most common medium for publication among respondents.
There seems to be a low awareness of institutional repositories as many respondents don’t know whether their publication is available via a digital repository.
Despite the increasing number of users accessing digital resources, it seems that a large proportion of researchers are not taking full advantage of digital tools when working with electronic data as they are approaching this type of content in the same way that they would access analogue resources. Use of digital tools to analyse digital information (e.g. data wrangling, textual and data analysis, etc.) is still relatively low among respondents.

Read the Complete Blog Post with More Findings from Survey (1808 Words)

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