لنستخرج كنوزا من المعرفة و الإبداع و العلم و الأفكار
E-books in relation to study and research
There is much debate in the literature about which format will prevail – electronic or print. Some authors argue that electronic will replace print, while others do not see electronic as ever being an alternative to print books for all purposes. Most have hedged their bets.
Studies on user behaviour indicate that print and e-books are not used in the same way. In the academic environment, e-books are generally used for quick reference, but for more serious study users prefer print books. Obviously, print books and e-books enable different learning styles, and as Penny Garrod pointed out several years ago, they ‘satisfy a different set of needs’.1
Both print and electronic formats have their place in academic and research libraries – for the time being at least. Electronic resources tend to complement printed material rather than replace it. With this in mind, libraries should find ways to offer both options to their users.
Electronic text has functionalities that print cannot offer, including hyperlinking, text-to-speech functionality and possibilities of being ‘illustrated’ by multimedia. Most studies show that electronic textbooks have a positive effect on learning outcomes. E-books have an especially important role in distance, mobile and e-learning, and the continuous growth of electronic classroom learning is expected to highlight the need for more of them.
Another issue puzzling many commentators is why e-journals so quickly found a dominant place in academia while e-books lagged behind. The 2009 Ithaka S+R survey found that faculty considered e-journals were very important for their research and teaching. At the same time, e-books were identified as least important.2 However, the survey done by Satisfaction Management Systems (SMS) and Elsevier's Science & Technology Division shows that researchers value e-books, and that, in most stages of their research, books are more important than journals (Figure 7.1).3
Figure 7.1. Value of books and journals to researchers depending on the stages of the research workflow.
The general opinion is that the successful integration of e-journals is a result of publishers and vendors working closely with libraries in developing business models that are satisfactory for all.
E-journal articles very much imitate print articles in the sense that they do not have many of the extra functionalities that electronic text allows. On the other hand, e-books have often been praised for having these very functionalities. However, most of the e-book collections provided by vendors and publishers are also only an electronic version of a print book. The critical difference is that one can download and print whole articles from journals, whereas many e-book platforms restrict users to a few pages at the time. The rules relating to sharing resources via interlibrary lending are also different for book and journal collections. Electronic e-articles fulfil users' needs for quick access and reading, while e-books are seen as a kind of text that can enhance learning by using the extra functionalities of electronic text. Further research would clarify these issues.
A number of studies on e-books argue that e-books offer new way of approaching text. The Springer study, Ebooks – The End User Perspective, says:
Overall, the survey results indicate that eBooks are best suited for research purposes or in a search environment where the user needs to locate specific information. Users are not reading eBooks cover-to-cover in the traditional sense but instead approach them as a resource for finding answers to research questions. eBooks have the potential to stimulate new forms of book content usage and will require libraries to think differently about how to accommodate the needs of users as their eBook collections grow.4
David Nicholas, head of University College London Information Studies, argues that librarians are still too preoccupied with resources and content and are
still trotting out the ‘fact’ that content is king; when in fact the consumer is very much the king now, and we need to know what the king (consumer) is up to.5
In this context, a very interesting study on how students search and retrieve information from electronic texts was done by Susan Wilkinson. She observed eye movements as students looked at online material, and in her article, Maximising student learning through minimising information search time; the role of satisficing and skimming, she says that students integrate the process of quality judgement with their learning.
Students are very specific in their behaviour when searching for information from on-line texts. They will not waste time judging the texts/sources before choosing one to study, and they will not judge an entire text/ source on the basis of its first page/paragraph, without skim-checking the remainder before leaving. This has led to a nested model of adaptive time allocation called the ‘satisfice then skim-check strategy’, whereby students use paragraphs/sections as a patch with which they can satisfice, but then skim-check the remainder of the paragraphs/sections on the page before moving to the next page. This model explains the search strategies used by students when learning from on-line texts, and has implications for the way in which on-line education environments should be designed.6
More studies in this field would shed more light on user preferences and help publishers design texts to facilitate learning processes and improve learning outcomes.
Link : https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/strategic-insight
