Undergraduate Science Students are Uncertain of How to Find Facts in E-books Compared to Print Books. A Review of: Berg, S. A., Hoffmann, K., Dawson, D. (2010). Not on the same page: Undergraduates' information retrieval in electronic and print books. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 36(6), 518-525

Objective – To observe and compare the strategies that undergraduate science students use to perform information retrieval tasks in e-books and in print books.Design – Qualitative analysis, employing a “prompted think-aloud” methodology and thematic analysis.Setting – Taylor Library (serving the Faculty of Science), University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.Subjects – Twenty undergraduate science students (11 females, 9 males) who had completed at least two years of study in Faculty of Science programs at the University of Western Ontario.Methods – Participants for the study were recruited through informational posters in Taylor Library, science departments, and in undergraduate science classes. Participants were assigned fact-finding tasks in e-book and print versions of eight health, computer science, and engineering textbooks and handbooks available in the Taylor Library. Book titles and tasks are included in a table in the study. Each student completed four tasks using e-books and four tasks using print books. Half of the participants performed tasks in print books first, and half began with tasks in e-books. Print books were “pre-selected” for each participant. The e-books were all from the same platform: Electronic Book Library. Participants were provided with a laptop computer to access the e-book versions, and a list of questions or facts to locate within each book. Following the methodology of Cotton & Gresty (2006), one researcher prompted students to verbalize actions while performing assigned tasks. A second researcher captured audio and video of the laptop screen as students individually conducted their e-book searches. A third researcher took notes on each session. An exit survey was given to each participant, asking about previous use, knowledge, and attitudes towards e-books. Thematic analysis was then used to examine the collected data.Main Results – Researchers identified four major themes from the data with regard to use of print versus e-books: linear/non-linear strategies; tangible/intangible aspects of books; met/unmet expectations; and transferable/non-transferable behaviours. Researchers found that participants tended to search print books in a linear fashion, whereas they approached e-books non-linearly. Physicality and familiarity with print books helped participants more readily find answers, compared to e-books, where students tried less successfully to mimic techniques used in print books to locate requested inform