• Journal of the Korean Society for information Management
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.211-222
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• 2009

Electronic publishing has influenced, and in some ways changed, information seeking, reading patterns and citation behaviours. This study collected the Cited Half-Lives, the indicator implies the life-span of scholarly journals, from JCR Social Science edition the before and after of the prevalence of electronic journals, and observed if there are some changes in these two periods. The analysis results of eight disciplines show that the average Cited Half-Lives increased in 2007 than in 1994 for seven disciplines except the demography. Especially in the four disciplines of economics, education, finance and sociology, the average Cited Half-Lives increased significantly. This results show that the concentration, researchers cite more recent articles and concentrate their citations on fewer ones, is lightening and the dispersion of citations is actually increasing. With the online availability of articles and journals the old online materials can be often accessed, used and cited more frequently, the more growth potential of Cited Half-Lives are made in a digital environment. Further research needs to investigate if the phenomenon will become more obvious in various disciplines after a few years.

• Journal of the Korean Society for information Management
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.7-34
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• 2009

The purpose of this study is to investigate the use of information resources of the humanities scholars in Korea and suggest the strategic planning of academic library and information services to serve their needs. To collect data, a mail survey was conducted during the period of November 2007 through January 2008. Out of 799 humanities scholars sampled from 25 universities, 132 responded with the completion rate of 16%. Major findings in this study are as follows: First, the majority of the humanities scholars distribute their time equally to research and education, and conduct independent research. Second, they still largely depend on print resources, including scholarly journals, books, and manuscripts for getting information, while using some online information resource mostly in text such as electronic documents and journals. They expect that the frequency of using such print resources would not decline much, but the use of online resources could definitely increase in the next five years. Some variances in the behavior were observed among the groups of scholars according to their research experiences. It is suggested that academic libraries (1) conduct more active outreach, (2) prioritize between traditional and electronic resources, (3) plan information literacy education for traditional resources.