| Niagara University Library A Study of Undergraduate Book Selection |
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In an attempt to examine what factors undergraduates consider when deciding to check out a book,
interviews were held with 28 undergraduates in the Spring of 2004. During the interviews,
students were presented with 11 sets of two books that were relatively the same in content.
Students were asked to choose a book and describe why they selected that book. Responses were
recorded and transcribed. Students were also asked to complete a questionnaire in which they
marked off the frequency in which they considered 20 factors (for example, date of publication,
the table of contents, illustrations, number of pages, etc.). The full methodology and results
will be described in an upcoming publication, but the short version of what we learned about
undergraduate book selection is as follows.
Navigation factors were most important to the students in selecting the books presented to them. Most of the time students seemed to be looking at the book from the perspective of how easy it would be for them to find information in the book, hence frequent viewing and mentions of table of contents. The practical benefit of this finding to librarians is problematic. It would seem to indicate that collection development librarians should consider navigation factors in selecting books, but, unless the book is in hand, this might be impractical. A further area of research is student use of the table of contents that are increasingly appearing in the bibliographic records of online catalogs. Could this be a factor in students determining which books they wish to retrieve from the shelf? Noticeably absent from the student decision making process were factors associated with what librarians consider to be information literacy skills. Students rarely mentioned considering an author’s credentials, the date of publication or publisher when choosing one book over another. Students focused mostly on convenience and ease of use. That is, they tended to be very practical in their selections. Nevertheless, it was somewhat surprising to us that students rarely evaluated the books in terms of the quality or authoritativeness of the information. It is possible that the students may have taken this aspect as a given—that is, assumed that if librarians were presenting the choices, that quality was not an issue. The study gave us new insight into an area that we did not know much about: the thought processes undergraduates experience in selecting books. This information can inform our collection development activity and our Library Instruction Program. |