Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Abstract Engineering faculty and graduate students use scholarly literature to inform their research and instruction. Expectations for immediate, online access to the scholarly literature is high. Engineering faculty and graduate students are accustomed to accessing the online full-text of sources through search tools that rely on subscription-based access through their university libraries, open access platforms, as well as through less official access routes. But what happens when the university library stops subscribing to a large body of Engineering literature due to cost and values-driven reasons for pausing relationships with certain publishers? After our library implemented a change in access to content through Elsevier, a publisher that provides access to many Engineering scholarly journals, we used this natural experiment to spur our exploration of this population's information seeking behaviors. We recruited a group of Engineering faculty and graduate students to participate in a mixed methods study to see what tools they used to find scholarly sources, access scholarly sources, and organize and read the literature they found. We surveyed our participants to learn how often they used library services like interlibrary loan and our article delivery service. We also asked how the change in access to sources published by Elsevier had impacted their research workflow. We then observed participants' searching in a natural setting where they explored their own research topics, using tools of their choosing, all while using a think-aloud protocol. We followed the searching exercise with an interview to determine how they made decisions about iterative searching and troubleshooting access issues. We also asked questions about their preferred research workflows. We will share the findings from this work, which help inform our understanding of what search tools advanced searchers in engineering are actually using, what tools they use to access the full-text of sources, and how they deal with setbacks to immediate access to sources. This work informs our collection development practices, our instruction practices, and our work supporting newer graduate students and researchers in developing research practices. Audience members will be encouraged to consider how to work with their Engineering faculty and graduate students if changes in subscription access are needed at their institution. We will also discuss how the realities of this population's use of scholarly sources aligns with the tools libraries currently provide.
Rempel et al. (Sun,) studied this question.