Library technology in content discovery-evidence from a large-scale reader survey

Abstract

It has long been understood that readers of scholarly journals use a wide variety of discovery resources to find relevant journal articles. In 2012, Simon Inger and Tracy Gardner undertook a large-scale international survey of journal readers 1 , which followed on from smaller surveys undertaken in 2005 and 2008. The survey benefited from over 19,000 responses from across the world, with over 25% of the responses coming from each of North America, Europe and Asia, half the responses coming from the academic sector, but with still many thousands of responses making up smaller demographics. This paper studies the findings for library technology and other library-purchased discovery resources from the survey.