Purpose – The aim of this study is to explore to which extent searching by medical students in Medline produces information items useful for writing an essay measured by precision and relative recall as perceived by the students, the proportion of cited items, and their utilization on four...

Purpose – The functional equivalence hypothesis suggests that a new communication medium will replace those activities that most closely perform the same functions for users as did the established media. There is scarce empirical evidence whether use of the internet displaces use of the public...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to compare the perceived benefits of public libraries and their structure in the major areas of life between Finland, Norway and the Netherlands. Design/methodology/approach – The data were based on representative samples of Finnish, Norwegian and Dutch...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate fiction readers’ interest criteria when selecting novels in library catalogs for various search tasks. Design/methodology/approach – The data of the book selection behavior from 80 genuine fiction readers were collected using recorded...