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Is TEEAL Making a Difference?

Mary Ochs

“You can’t do research out of the blue.  You need access to some published literature.  Before the introduction of TEEAL, it was really hard to get literature.  Some students would have only three citations in an assignment.  If I am looking for literature, I go to TEEAL first.”

M.Sc. student, agricultural economics, Malawi

In libraries, we want to know whether our users are satisfied….with our collections, with our services, with our facilities.  Are we making a difference?  Assessing whether users are satisfied is quite challenging when those users are thousands of miles away.  In 2004 Mann Library received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to perform a user study for TEEAL (The Essential Electronic Agricultural Library).  After six years of producing and distributing TEEAL sets, it was time to find out in an organized way what users were thinking.  We needed to test whether we were succeeding in the overarching goal of the TEEAL Project, which is to improve access to scholarly information in support of research and teaching in agricultural universities and research institutes in the developing world.  The good news from the study is that TEEAL is making a difference! 

The TEEAL User Study consisted of three parts: 1) on-site interviews with users and nonusers in six different countries; 2) a survey of users and nonusers in sixteen institutions that have installed TEEAL; and 3) a bibliometric analysis of citation data from African universities from the CAB database.  Raul Roman, at the time a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication, assisted TEEAL staff with the study design and carried out two sets of on-site interviews, one in Latin America and one in Southeast Asia.  Gracian Chimwaza, the director of the TEEAL Africa Office, also did on-site interviews in Africa.  And back in Ithaca….Olivia Vent, Nicole Joos, and Greg Lawrence worked on both the logistics (which were quite complicated!) and the analysis of the survey.

Results of the TEEAL user study indicate that TEEAL is successfully meeting its objectives.  The survey data confirm the high value students and researchers place on access to current scientific literature and the positive role of TEEAL in addressing their literature needs.  Students, educators, and researchers consider TEEAL to be very useful in their work, enhancing both their productivity and the quality of their work.  For example, the graph below shows responses to the question, Has the literature in TEEAL influenced your research?

TEEAL Chart 

The study also demonstrates that TEEAL has influenced how scientists search for information.  Most users find TEEAL easy to use, once provided with a basic orientation. Data show, though, that the use of TEEAL would increase dramatically if certain constraints, such as restricted hours of use, not enough computers and printers, and expensive printing charges, were ameliorated.

Results also confirm that, in Africa, access to the Internet is limited both on university campuses and at research institutes.  Thus, until Internet technology is more widely available and affordable, Web-based programs to deliver scientific literature need to be complemented with lower-tech systems like TEEAL.

The TEEAL staff is using the results of the study to plan for the future of TEEAL.  For example, the new Local Area Network version of TEEAL was created in response to the feedback from the survey.  The study has been invaluable in helping us understand our distant user community.  The full report of the study is available on the newly revamped TEEAL Web site.

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