Guest Editors of this issue: Emily M. Okada and the Steering Committee of the Bibliographic Instruction/User Education Section, Indiana Library Federation.
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Browsing Volume 16, Number 1 (1997) by Author "Hogan-Vidal, Patricia"
(H.W. Wilson Company, 1997) Hogan-Vidal, Patricia; Kreps, Dennis
We defined the phenomenon of database dependency as the behavior
of a library user to immediately select computerized information resources
without considering (1) the appropriateness of the electronic gesource to the
immediate information need, (2) the quality and accuracy of the information
found, and (3) the amount of time it may take to find the information in a
database compared to finding a print resource in that library.
The librarians at the Talk Table agreed that patrons seem to accept
whatever information they find in an electronic resource even if it takes
longer to get the answer, the answer is incomplete, or if the information
would have been more easily found in a print reference source. The academic
librarians said that they have been seeing this behavior in their libraries for
the last several years. The public librarians agreed that this behavior is increasing
in their libraries as people are becoming more comfortable with
computers.