JISC has released User Behaviour Observational Study: Scholarly Digital Use and Information-Seeking Behaviour in Business and Economics.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
The report covers the digital usage and information seeking behaviour of tens of thousands of business/economics/management students, researchers and academic staff. The intention was to inform and provide a context for the small-scale but detailed observational and interview studies undertaken by Middlesex University researchers for a JISC funded User Behaviour Observational Study (Business and Economics). Much of the data were mined from CIBER’s Virtual Scholar research programme and has not been previously published in this form. New data was also obtained from the studies CIBER are currently conducting, especially from the JISC national E-book Observatory project and the RIN funded E-journals study. Log data, the main source of information on usage and information seeking, covers a period of more than five years and the questionnaire data represents more than 5000 people so this probably represents the biggest and most comprehensive usage data set ever assembled on the subject. E-books and e-journals are covered and usage at the three JISC User Behaviour Observational Study case study institutions—LSE, Middlesex and Cranfield, are highlighted A whole variety of analyses are featured including: volume and, patterns of use (in terms of visits and page views), dwell time (session and page times), type of content viewed (PDF, abstracts etc), number of pages viewed in a session, methods of navigating towards content, age of material viewed, and number of searches conducted, names of titles used, user’s organization, age and gender, hardcopy v digital preferences, viewing/reading behaviour.
