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Exploratory Essay

1448 Words6 Pages

The advent of the Internet has had an undeniable effect on the information seeking behavior of those operating in a higher education setting, with students and academics benefiting from unprecedented access to vast amounts of information on a day-to-day basis. This essay is an introductory review of current literature, utilizing a small cross section of studies available. It was found that while most agree that increased access to information via the Internet in university settings has been of great benefit, it has not led to an increase in information literacy and is actually making the process of evaluating and using information more difficult for students and faculty. There were also some incongruent findings and gaps in the research considered, …show more content…

Catalano (2013) concluded that the amount and overall quality of information available for students to use for research has greatly improved since the digitization of journals and gaining access through online channels. The Catalan university study found that 75% of faculty read significantly more journal articles since digitization, with the increase solely due to the convenience of remotely accessing articles online (Ollé and Borrego, 2010). Tenopir, C., King, D.W., Edwards, S., & Wu, L. (2009) had similar findings in their four decades (1977 to 2005) of research, reporting that university science faculty members on average read more articles per year in every year the survey was conducted, with the amount doubling in thirty years. Further support in the literature is given to this important benefit of online research in the Junni (2007) study. It was found that scholarly article citation increased 14.1% between 1985 and 2003. Further, the average age of sources read also significantly decreased, from 12.8 years to 9.9 years, proposing that online research is leading to more current sources being used for reading and citation, an idea supported by Olle and Borrego (2010). However there is disagreement over this benefit in online research, since Tenopir et al. (2009) found that the average age of articles read remained stable over the course of the survey period. We can clearly surmise from the reviewed literature that access to journals online has had a positive impact on the information seeking of students and faculty, providing more convenient access to quality scholarly information. This is the biggest benefit of online research identified in the reviewed literature. The study did however identify concerning limitations and problems in having access to unlimited

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