Many studies of information-seeking habits of engineers focus on understanding the similarities and differences between scientists and engineers. This study explores the information-seeking behavior of academic engineering faculty from twenty public research universities. This investigation includes an examination of how frequently engineering faculty seek or access information, how they keep abreast of current developments in the field and find less recent journal articles, how often they visit the library in person, and how important library services and resources are in meeting their information needs. The responses from the survey participants emphasize the importance of electronic access to current and archived scholarly journals for meeting the research and information needs of engineering faculty.cademic librarians continuously strive to meet the information needs of their users. This requires an understanding of their users' information needs and information-seeking behaviors. This study examines the information-seeking behavior of engineering faculty at twenty academic institutions from across the United States. To better understand how engineering faculty are responding to changes in the information environment, the researchers examined how frequently engineering faculty seek or access information to complete specific tasks, how engineering faculty keep abreast of current developments, how they discover less recent journal articles in their field, how often they visit the library in person, and how important library resources and services are in meeting their information needs.Understanding the nature of the user community and the information-seeking habits and practices of the users are common themes in library literature. With improved understanding of the information-seeking behavior of engineers in academic environments, librarians can better develop information services and resources, implement policies that help engineering faculty access quality information, and improve collection development practices. Literature Review Engineers as PractitionersKing, Casto, and Jones compiled a comprehensive literature review of engineers' information needs, noting that "the 1960s yielded a plethora of STI [scientific and technical information] user studies and surveys largely funded by the federal government."1 The information-seeking crl-155

The dawn of the Internet era has prompted many researchers to investigate changes in the use of academic libraries, but most studies explore student use, rather than faculty use, of library space. In contrast, this study surveys use of the academic library space among faculty and doctoral students and explores the phenomenological differences between using library space and using the library remotely. The authors hypothesized that older scholars (by age and by “scholarly age,” as measured by the year in which the scholar’s last academic degree was earned) would report greater use of the physical library and less use of the library’s electronic resources and would make more positive statements about the physical space than would younger scholars. In three of the four major themes that emerged from the qualitative survey data, this hypothesis is supported. However, in the fourth theme, “conduciveness to scholarship,” the opposite position was supported. Younger scholars were far more likely than older scholars to make statements reflecting the idea that the physical library is a unique place that facilitates the kind of concentration necessary for doing serious scholarly work.

The value of the academic library as “place” in the university community has recently been debated in the popular and scholarly library literature, but the debate centers on student use of library space rather than faculty use. This study addresses the issue of faculty use of library space by investigating the use of “faculty spaces”—individual, enclosed, lock-able carrels or studies—through a series of interviews with faculty space holders at the University of Oklahoma and a survey of ARL libraries. Both elements of the investigation show that faculty spaces are heavily used and highly valued by faculty members, especially those in the social sciences and humanities. The researchers present the results of the interviews and the survey, and explore the reasons for the continuing value of faculty spaces in the age of electronic information.