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This article seeks to understand information behavior in the context of the academic e-book user experience, shaped by a disparate set of vendor platforms licensed by libraries. These platforms vary in design and affordances, yet studies of e-book use in an academic context often treat e-books as a unified phenomenon in opposition to print books. Based on participant diaries tracking e-book information behavior and follow-up interviews and focus groups on troubleshooting and format shifting behaviors, this study seeks to provide a deep qualitative look at decisions that academic users make about formats when encountering e-books. It identifies reasons for noted disparities between stated user preferences for print books while often using e-books instead. It also demonstrates the importance of considering e-books as a set of formats, rather than a unified experience, when evaluating e-book platforms or providing information services around a set of platforms. While e-book studies often point to a distinction between “use” of e-books and “reading” of print books by users, this study shows much more willingness to both use and read e-books for some tasks if platforms allow for offloading reading of content to preferred reading devices and apps. This has implications for collection development, advocacy with vendors, and for marketing to or consulting with users about e-book access and use options.

1. Introduction Librarians have many tools at their disposal for assessing library instruction, but it is rare to assess each individual student as they search for information. Through the analysis of search transaction logs the authors of this article were able to observe this key student behavior for 29 sections of a general education communication course taught in the spring semester of 2011. This study includes a total of 1,636 unique searches performed by 579 students using Easy Search, the federated search system developed at the University of Illinois. The results and analysis provide suggestions for librarians teaching undergraduates to construct more relevant, targeted searches. These lessons can help librarians both in the classroom and at the reference desk. As libraries increase options for student searching, ranging from native databases to federated search tools to web-scale discovery systems, we must remain cognizant of how students search in order to determine how best to help them construct searches that provide quality, relevant results. The primary purpose of this study was to observe how students searched during a library instruction session. The authors were interested in assessing several things: whether students followed the teacher librarian and put into practice search strategies taught during the class, what resources the students selected, how they interacted with automated suggestions from the search tool, and whether they were persistent in revisions to their own searches. In each instruction session, students first participated in a

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Although gay bathhouses have been the subject of debate and some public health policy for decades, the relative number and geographic distribution of these establishments has not been described. As a result, it is easy to miss or ignore them in making public policy in response to discase prevention. No straightforward methodology for such a description is available, so we used a series of gay travel books, first published in 1965 by the Damron Company, to estimate this distribution in the United States and Canada. Each of the annual guides published from 1968 to 1999 were reviewed for listings of bathhouses and sex clubs. The results suggest that bathhouses and other similar establishments exist in most states and provinces and in most large and many moderate-sized cities. Furthermore, the largest numbers of listings for bathhouses were in the same six cities across the decades, three in the U.S. and three in Canada. The greatest change in the number of listings was seen in the three U.S. cities where a public policy of closure was attempted. Nevertheless, the numbers of venues in these three cities have been increasing again since the early 1990s, although nothing near the numbers of listings in the late 1970s and early 1980s.