Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future

April– October 2007
Funded by BL/JISC
Research Team: Ian Rowlands, David Nicholas, Paul Huntington, Barrie Gunter, Richard Withey, Tom Dobrowolski, Carol Tenopir, Pete Williams, Maggie Fieldhouse and Hamid Jamali

The aim of this project is to discover: a) whether or not as a result of the digital transition and resources being created digitally, young people, the “google generation”, are searching for and researching content in new ways and if so, how this will shape the way they research and search in the future; b) whether or not new ways of searching and researching for content will prove to be any different from the way that existing researchers/scholars work. CIBER’s design for this proposal involves three overlapping activities. The first activity is to undertake a virtual longitudinal approach. This draws on past research, placing it in a meta-analysis framework, so that we can make the most legitimate comparisons we can between different studies conducted at different times by different researchers. Central to this activity is CIBER’s archive of data from the Virtual Scholar programme, which comprises a mass of unfiltered information about the information habits and behaviour of specialist researchers and undergraduates. The second activity is to collect and analyse primary data about the use of the British Library Learning and Intute websites by people of different ages, using deep log analysis. This will provide rich insights into actual behaviour, including, for the first time, that of pre-university students. The third activity will bring together an expert panel to help assess the strategic implications of the findings from the virtual longitudinal and deep log studies.