1. Understanding digital natives
Professor David Nicholas
CIBER
UCL Centre for Publishing
University College London
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/research/ciber/

2. Background
• Choice, digital transition, unbelievable
access, Google & disintermediation
transformed information landscape
• Because so much information seeking
goes on remotely and anonymously not
woken up to this yet. Yet digital
transition further to go: e-books
• Badly need to visualise and
conceptualise what is going on,
especially in regard the young
• Hence CIBER’s Virtual Scholar research
programme

3. Methods and projects
• Seven years of data – millions of digital footprints in e-book, e-journal, e-
learning and e-cultural databases; every subject, every country
• Strength: what people did, not what they say they do or wish they did.
Formidable evidence base. Key studies include:
– The digital revolution: information seeking experiments with young
people. With BBC Television, 2009 – 2010
– User driven development for Europeana. Funded by the European
Commission, 2009-2010
– Evaluating the usage and impact of e-journals in the UK. Funded by the
Research Information Network, 2008-2010
– UK National E-Books Observatory. Funded by JISC, 2008-2009
– The Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future (Google Generation).
Funded by the British Library and JISC, 2007

4. The Big finding
• Really only one finding and that is the digital has fundamentally
changed us all – we are all the GoogleGeneration! We have all been
conditioned
• You have heard of extreme sports, well we have all become
extreme information seekers and young people, as with everything,
are more extreme
• The really big difference is that young people know no other world
• What has to said at the outset is that we still do not know whether
what we are seeing is simply a manifestation of age differences
rather than generational differences
• Will now focus on the four aspects of digital information use and
seeking which have the most significance for publishers

5. A. The horizontal has replaced the
vertical
They flick and skitter. Victoria!
• Promiscuity: 40% do not come back
• Bouncing: half visitors view 1-3 pages from
thousands available. Bounce in and then out
again
• A consequence of:
– Massive choice, shopping around, being
lured away by search engines, poor
retrieval skills (2.3words), leaving
memories in cyberspace: all add to
‘churn’ rate
– Direct result of end-user checking
– An ‘acceptance of failure’ - shortage of
time & overload
• Younger they are more promiscuous they are
and more they bounce

6. B. Viewing has replaced reading
• Power browsing
• Have been conditioned by emailing,
text messaging, Tweeting and
PowerPoint
• Context: 15 minutes a long time
online
• Don’t view an article online for
more than 5 or so minutes
• If long, either read abstract or
squirrel away for a day when it will
not be read (digital osmosis)
• Editors and length of articles!
• Go online to avoid reading.

7. Power browsing example
• I can update my knowledge very
quickly…the sheer number of
books is overwhelming, if I can
look at them very quickly – you
know within 15 mins, I can look
at 3 or 4 books – and get some
very superficial knowledge of
what is in them, nevertheless it
improves my scholarship, because
in the back of my mind, these
books already exist

8. C. They like it simple and fast
• Avoid carefully-crafted discovery systems.
Killer stats:
– 4 months after SD content was opened to
Google, a third of traffic to physics journals
arrived that way. Effect particularly notable
since physics richly endowed with information
systems and services;
– Historians biggest users of Google, together
with young people! ;
– Love gateway sites
• Advanced search used rarely, and hardly at all
by highly-rated research institutions.
• Fast bag pick-up
• Fast information for a fast food generation

9. D. Brand and authority is much more complicated
• Difficult in cyberspace:
responsibility/authority almost
impossible in a digital environment –
so many players, so many brands, so
much churn
• Also what you think is brand is not
what other people think, especially
what young people think. Wallmart!

10. Conclusions: GG V the rest
• Searches lighter.
– View fewer pages, visit fewer sites and did fewer searches during a visit.
– Spend much less time on each question, a fraction of that spent by older
generations. Trend intensifies as questions become more ambiguous.
• Lazier, more direct searchers.
– Their search statements were much closer textually to the question as
given than older participants. Copy and paste OK!
• Less confident searchers
– Don't have the evaluation skills to really know, hence they cut and run. Far
less confident about judging the quality/relevance of what they find.
• Crowd source
– Under 20s spend more time on social networking sites, are more regular
users and rate them more importantly. Not kids but younger adults the
biggest users
• Multi-tasking
– Young adults the biggest but we don’t know that they are the best

11. Conclusions: a dumbing down?
• In broad terms young people’s
behaviour can be portrayed as
being frenetic, bouncing,
navigating, checking and
viewing. Also promiscuous,
diverse and volatile.
• Partly, because lacking a
mental map, sense of
collection, what is good, and
over reliance on Google
• Does this all constitute a
dumbing down?

12. Suggestions for publishers
Huge success story so far but no room for complacency
1. Create immersive digital environments and ones you can
speed across
2. Access no longer an outcome; you need to demonstrate
academic outcomes
3. Monitor, monitor and monitor again the virtual
environment, otherwise you will decouple from your
consumer base

13. 1a. ‘Immersive’ social information environments
• The students said something which threw us all initially - they could
not understand why they had to do all the work in getting
something from the website. At first this was attributed to laziness
but it turned out not to be that. They felt the content was locked,
submerged and they had to dig a lot to see it, when maybe the
service could make some things available automatically – the data
coming to them, rather than having to chase it.
• Returned book trolley! Come on guys wake up, stop chasing
FaceBook the lessons to be learnt are in your own backyard

14. 1b. Help power browse
• Shorten and structure articles; downloads not the
gold standard; help people move fast or flick.
• Love abstracts make them more informative
• Elsevier doing interesting things here

15. 2. Demonstrate academic and financial outcomes
• Better students, degrees, researchers, more funding etc
• Information literacy role –publishers the new librarians
• Cost-effectiveness – the car park question

16. 3. Monitor, monitor and monitor
• User-driven revolution
• Dynamic - an Internet year just 7 weeks
• Digital concrete

17. Further information

18. Book
•http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/index.shtml

19. BBC TV Programme

20. CIBER website