Students engagement in Open University Malaysia graduate centre (OUM GC): Does information seeking behaviour plays a role?

The objective of this study is to examine the relationships between Information Seeking Behaviour (ISB) and engagement of students in Open University Malaysia Graduate Centre (OUM GC). A literature review was undertaken to develop the instrument. Face-to-face data collection method was adopted. A total of 89 respondents from convenient sampling was analysed to answer the research hypotheses. A factor analysis was performed on the independent variable to manage the items and discover new constructs as a way to contribute to the area of study. The Kaiser Meyer Olkin figure is reported to be 0.77, indicating validity of the model. Cronbach Alpha for all variables are reported to be above 0.70, indicating reliability. There is a relationship between information seeking behaviour and student engagement as designated in the regression model. This paper will also give more information to ODL universities which can help them in their decision making process and ability to allocate resources. (Abstract by authors

The Effects of Discipline Membership and Experience in the Field on Scholars’ Book and Journal Format Preferences

Using data from Ithaka S + R US Faculty Survey 2015, the current study examined the influence of disciplinary differences and experience levels as well as their interactions on scholars’ attitudes toward print and electronic materials. While results of 3 × 5 factorial ANOVA procedure indicated both disciplinary membership and experience played a role in scholars’ attitudes, effect size indicated disciplinary membership played a more crucial role. Significant findings include rising popularity of electronic formats across examined groups

Analysing Information Seeking Behavior of College Students in Changing Environment

This research paper investigated the information seeking behavior of college students surveying twelve colleges affiliated to the University of Delhi. Different variable sets were used to analyse the undergraduates’ reading habits, information needs, information search and information use behavior. Total 506 undergraduate students of different disciplines such as sciences, social sciences and humanities were selected as a sample applying multistage and stratified sampling techniques. The study applied SPSS, Version-25 for analysing the various aspects of the study. Results revealed that books were the most preferred source of information among 84.2 percent of the undergraduate students followed by newspapers (64.9 percent) and magazines (43.7 percent) in all the three disciplines. In addition, 34.3 percent undergraduate students were inclined for reading books in more often printed less often electronic format, newspapers (37.3 percent) respondents in both printed and electronic in equal proportion and magazine (52.4 percent) in more often electronic and less often printed format. On the basis of weighted mean, keyword search (206.3 WM) followed by phrase search (159.1 WM) were always used by the students for information search and retrieval. The maximum number of 24.7 percent respondents in humanities, sciences (23.5 percent) and social sciences (23.3 percent) found print resources more reliable than electronic resources

Web users' language utilization behaviors in China

The paper focuses on the habits of China Web users' language utilization behaviors in accessing the Web. It also seeks to make a general study on the basic nature of language phenomenon with regard to digital accessing. A questionnaire survey was formulated and distributed online for these research purposes. There were 1,267 responses collected. The data were analyzed with descriptive statistics, Chi-square testing and contingency table analyses. Results revealed the following findings. Tagging has already played an important role in Web2.0 communication for China's Web users. China users rely greatly on all kinds of taxonomies in browsing and have also an awareness of them in effective searching. These imply that the classified languages in digital environment may aid Chinese Web users in a more satisfying manner. Highly subject-specific words, especially those from authorized tools, yielded better results in searching. Chinese users have high recognition for related terms. As to the demographic aspect, there is little difference between different genders in the utilization of information retrieval languages. Age may constitute a variable element to a certain degree. Educational background has a complex effect on language utilizations in searching. These research findings characterize China Web users' behaviors in digital information accessing. They also can be potentially valuable for the modeling and further refinement of digital accessing services.</p

Information needs and utilization among social science undergraduates in Nigerian universities

Information is a means through which knowledge about a phenomenon derived from observation, study experience or instruction and collection in varying ways. However, failure rates continue to increase in some universities in Nigeria, and information dissemination is not improving. This study, therefore, examines the information needs and utilisation of undergraduates in the Departments of Accountancy and Business Administration within three selected Nigerian Universities based on ownership. The study adopts qualitative research approach using interview method to collect data in the federal, state and privately owned universities. The research adopted snowball sampling method as it was difficult to determine the specific sample frame due to non-availability of intake records. The study therefore recruited ninety respondents for an interview from the three universities covering various disciplines in social sciences including Business Administration, Accounting, Economics and Finance. The study was guided by Wilson’s 1991 information behaviour model using it major variables of information needs, seeking, awareness, utilisation and outcome. Findings revealed that students require relevant information that will assist them to succeed in their academic career. It also found that information needs of students vary depending on their course of study. Students, however, utilise information for various purposes including academic work, social networking, community development and lifelong learning experience

Understanding Information Seeking Behavior of Indonesian Postgraduate Students in Malaysian Universities: An Empirical Study

Abstract : This study investigates Indonesian postgraduate student’s experience at the pre-sessional program of the process of seeking information and the strategies they used throughout the process. The objective is to understand their information seeking behavior particularly academic-related information in order to improve the effectiveness of educational communication in Malaysia higher institutions. Two research questions are addressed: what experiences do pre-sessional students face in the process of information seeking that can be articulated and described? What stages do pre-sessional students experience in the process of information seeking construction? Using the qualitative method, the study found that the pre-sessional students have different patterns in the constructive process of information seeking in two different groups i.e. writing and reading classes. Six stages and four stages of the search process were identified respectively for the two groups

Extracting discourse elements and annotating scientific documents using the SciAnnotDoc model: a use case in gender documents

When scientists are searching for informa- tion, they generally have a precise objective in mind. Instead of looking for documents “about a topic T”, they try to answer specific questions such as finding the definition of a concept, finding results for a particular problem, checking whether an idea has already been tested, or comparing the scientific conclusions of two articles. Answering these precise or complex queries on a corpus of scientific documents requires precise mod- elling of the full content of the documents. In particu- lar, each document element must be characterised by its discourse type (hypothesis, definition, result, method, etc.). In this paper we present a scientific document model (SciAnnotDoc ontology), developed from an em- pirical study conducted with scientists, that models the discourse types. We developed an automated process that analyse documents effectively identifying the dis- course types of each element. Using syntactic rules (pat- terns), we evaluated the process output in terms of pre- cision and recall using a previously annotated corpus in Gender Studies. We chose to annotate documents in Humanities, as these documents are well known to be less formalised than those in “hard science”. The process output has been used to create a SciAnnotDoc representation of the corpus on top of which we built a faceted search interface. Experiments with users show that searches using with this interface clearly outper- form standard keyword searches for precise or complex queries

Information seeking behaviour of mathematicians : scientists and students

Introduction. The paper presents original research designed to explore and compare selected aspects of the information seeking behaviour of mathematicians (scientists and students) on the Internet. Method. The data were gathered through a questionnaire distributed at the end of 2011 and in January 2012. Twenty-nine professional mathematicians and 153 students of mathematics from the Institute of Mathematics of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, were surveyed. Analysis. The gathered data were analysed in a quantitative manner and then interpreted comparatively to find similarities and differences between the behaviour of professional mathematicians and students. Results. Students, as opposed to scientists, often declared searching for reference works and multimedia objects and comparatively rarely for journal papers and information about sources unavailable on the Web. They more willingly use social networking sites while scientists more often search discipline-oriented portals or library Websites. Scientists use, first of all, the author's name or the publication titles to formulate queries, students prefer keyword searching. While scientists trust their own ability to determine the scientific character of information or treat journals as determinants of the scientific quality, students do not. Conclusions. The research revealed some significant differences between the information seeking behaviour of those two groups of mathematicians. It could be the result of different levels of experience in scientific work, distinct tasks undertaken within the academic environment, and the change in the general paradigm of information searching