Tuesday December 05, 2006

Differences in how researchers and librarians see things

The source for the table below is a report from the UK-based Research Information Network called Researchers and discovery services: behaviors, perceptions and needs.  They collected their data by phone interviewing 400 researchers and 50 librarians in the UK.  The executive summary is worth a review, though I want to call attention to the section on the comparison between researcher survey results and librarian survey results.

One of the areas of high divergence that caught my eye is the librarian perception that researchers only undertake simple searches, whereas a significant percentage of researchers self-report as undertaking a variety of search strategies (simple to sophisticated) depending on the task.

Anyone find any of these conclusions surprising?