Positively Perplexing E-Books: Digital Natives’ Perceptions of Electronic Information Resources

Anecdotal evidence from user surveys and the experiences of information professionals portray a picture that today’s students (i.e., “digital natives”) do not differentiate between the variety of information resources online. The issue of container only becomes problematic to these students when they have to produce a scholarly work and cite their information sources. Then the question becomes, “What is it?” This paper will present preliminary data from a survey of university students on how they recognize and label electronic information resources. The authors will explore such questions as: Do users recognize an e-book as a book? If not, how do they categorize it? Does the amount and placement of labeling from the publisher make a difference in their recognition? Do they differentiate between an academic database and a search engine? Are a newspaper article and a peer-reviewed journal article considered synonymous? Introduction/Background The first e-book proudly raised its head in 1971 with Project Gutenberg (Galbraith, 2011). For libraries, their proliferation began in 1998 with the launch of NetLibrary. But it wasn’t until the later 2000s that the big explosion began. Growth in the public libraries was faster, but the academic world was soon catching up. One difference that developed in academic libraries was the number of platforms e-books were available through. For example, the authors’ county public library offers e-book access through three different platforms. In comparison, their university has, to date, 32 platforms that provide e-book access and are aware of at least a dozen more available in the market. The authors believe this extensive variety potentially plays a role in the confusion of university students when it comes to recognition. The first idea for this research germinated when one of the authors was listening to a presentation on ebrary’s 2011 e-book survey (McKiel, 2012). The speaker was remarking on their surprise that between 2008 and 2011 e-book usage had actually decreased according to the survey responses. However, ebrary’s usage statistics showed that there had, in fact, been a dramatic rise in use over this time period. The author immediately thought “They don’t know what they are using is an e-book.” ebrary recognized this and sent a follow-up survey asking two questions. The first was ‘When you are using electronic resources at your library how often do you know what type of document you are using?” Less than half (47.39%) said “always.” This indicates the majority of students have at least some confusion. Years of experience working with university students provides plenty of anecdotal evidence that students don’t differentiate between the various online resources. It seems that they don’t care what the container is called--until they have to cite it for an annotated bibliography, research paper, poster, or other assignment. Indeed, the second ebrary follow-up question was “Do you care about what electronic document you are using as long at the information is authoritative?” and 53.4% said “no.” The authors could give numerous examples of students asking “How do I cite this journal article?” and the first thing the librarian has to do is correct them on what it actually is. This is not a journal article, it is a book chapter, or it is a government report, and so on. This presented the question, what do today’s university students, who have essentially grown up with the Internet, call the different online resources? Is everything just a website? Experience has also taught librarians that students