• Journal of the Korean Society for information Management
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.95-116
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• 2019

This study focused on understanding the Korean university students' (both undergraduates and graduates) use of foreign language for scholarly information retrieval especially in different search strategies employed based on users' characteristics. A new model was developed based on Ellis's behavioral model of information seeking strategies. The research applied both quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the data. The students used a variety of foreign language information seeking strategies at different stages of academic information retrieval based on his/her field of study or level of education. The liberal arts and social science students had more difficulty in selecting proper search terms in the foreign language than the science and technology students. This difficulty resulted in less preference for using foreign language queries by the liberal arts and social science students. The students relied more on the bibliographic and citation information in scholarly information retrieval using foreign language queries than the Korean queries. The research outcomes should provide some guidelines on how the Korean university libraries offer information literacy programs and other services based on the patrons' characteristics.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Library and Information Science
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• v.49 no.2
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• pp.51-73
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• 2015

The Web now provides instant access to an unprecedented amount of information that was unthinkable even 20-30 years ago. However, the full potential of the contents available through the Internet can only be realized when one can speak and understand foreign languages, especially English which accounts for more than half of web contents. In this study, we try to investigate the effect of search task languages and task complexity on searching performance. A total of thirty students enrolled at a top private university in Korea were recruited as study subjects. We set up a quasi-experimental design in which thirty subjects are randomly assigned to a set of eight different search tasks containing an equal number of simple and complex tasks and an equal number of tasks in Korean and in English. The results show that there is a significant difference between simple and complex tasks in terms of SERP time, number of queries used, correctness of results and total search time. However, task language does not seem to have affected search performance for this study group. In addition, students with high English proficiency test scores show comparable search performance in English tasks compared with lower test scores. But we note differences in behavioral patterns (different search engines used and search tactics) among the study participants.