Why Can’t Students Get the Sources They Need? Results from a Real Electronic Resources Availability Study

Abstract

Availability studies are used to estimate the proportion of items in a library collection that are available to users, and the proportion of items in a library collection that are unavailable to users as a result of system and/or human errors. Sanjeet Mann of the Armacost Library at the University of Redlands used a series of availability studies to more accurately understand and troubleshoot the e-resources access errors that keep undergraduate students at the university from obtaining the full text of electronic resources. In this presentation, Mann shared the details of his process, his results, and the implications of those results for improving local search systems as well as a conceptual model of e-resource availability errors based on the results of his research.