Academics and the new information environment: the impact of local factors on use of electronic journals

Academic use of journals is influenced by many factors, e.g. users' subject disciplines, their roles or level within the university, their local information environment of print and electronic resources, awareness of those resources, and their information needs on a particular day, SuperJournal is a project in the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) researching academic use of electronic journals, the features they value most and the factors that will make electronic journals successful. The project has developed a number of hypotheses about the factors that influence usage and is testing them in a systematic and quantitative way, This paper focuses on articulating the factors to be considered in the impact of the local information environment and early evidence for their importance in the implementation and use of electronic journals.