Methods for gathering and analyzing information seeking behaviour in electronic resource discovery systems

This paper reports on the use of a combination of cognitive task analysis techniques – such as observations with ‘think aloud’, the Critical Decision Method (CDM) interviews and Cued Recall – to identify and understand what students and researchers do when searching for scholarly material using various electronic resource discovery systems. It describes the use of Emergent Themes Analysis to discover broad themes across all the data sets collected. This paper also presents a visual representation of the process of information seeking developed during data analysis that allowed the patterns of activities to emerge and show the relationship between different actions. Overall, it is that the use of multiple research methods can reduce the limitations of individual methods and provides complementary insights.