Students’ Information Needs and Digital Technologies in Academic Libraries

Abstract

Thesis/objective – The topic of this article is the influence of digital technologies on the functioning of academic libraries in the context of their users’ needs. Users’ information behaviors have changed significantly through the influence of these technologies, what can be identified in particular in students’ behaviors. Do far-reaching changes in the way in which users, in case of this article - students, interact with information cause transformations in the functioning and mission of academic libraries? On the basis of literature containing the results of researches conducted around the world an attempt was made to present the way academic libraries react to these changes and how they modify their services and resources. Research method – The first step in responding to the actual needs of users is to conduct research in this area. For this reason, the subject of the analysis in this article were publications presenting research on the users’ (students) needs in the context of using academic libraries. The next stage was to identify the texts in which the use of digital technology was discussed. The analyzed literature was selected from leading journals indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A & HCI), and included articles which were published within the last 5 years (2013-2018) – a period in which digital technologies in most academic libraries in the world were most widely used, making changes caused by them possible to be diagnosed, and which corresponds to the information query. The results of the query contained 328 articles, 80 of them have been analyzed in detail, because they were deemed to contain the results of research on the functioning of academic libraries in the context of the needs and expectations of the students. Results/conclusions – On the basis of the analysis it can be concluded that the widespread use of digital technologies has changed functioning of academic libraries to a large extent, but these changes are not revolutionary. The way of implementing library tasks has changed, but the tasks themselves as well as the mission of an academic library have remained similar. One of the most important postulates for the future is the necessity of far-reaching personalization of the services being offered. The conducted analysis is based on the research presented in the literature, the next planned stage is verification of these conclusions in empirical research.