E-Resource Access Behaviors of Engineering Researchers: A Mixed Methods Study

Libraries are continually seeking the most effective and sustainable ways to provide e-resources, particularly in the form of scholarly journals and books, to their researcher communities. Increasingly, librarians use a blend of strategies including changing our subscription contracts, highlighting open access sources, and relying on resource sharing networks. To learn how these approaches are impacting a specific user community’s research behaviors, we used a mixed-methods approach that paired quantitative findings from collections access data with qualitative feedback from structured searching observations. In particular, we wanted to determine if the barriers to immediately accessing the full-text of current research resulting from a reduction in access to subscription-based sources from the publisher Elsevier impacted how our researchers found, accessed, and used scholarly literature. The results of this research captured how advanced engineering researchers responded to a disruption in unmediated access to Elsevier content, how they responded to access barriers to library resources in general, and the breadth of their use of online resources and connections outside of the library. We discuss how this research may inform future considerations in collection development and management for academic libraries.