THE PRACTICES OF ACCESSING AND SAVING INFORMATION. A SURVEY OF USING DIGITAL VS TRADITIONAL MEDIA

The pervasiveness of the Internet and new electronic devices has changed significantly information searching practices. However, little is known about users' further behaviors: methods of storing and using information. The purpose of the study was to examine the actual behavior of users when they intend to use in the future the information retrieved from the Internet. The survey also examined the extent to which students actually use the Internet for obtaining information, as well as the proportion between the use of digital and traditional printed sources of information. The study was conducted at four universities from four different countries. Although the most popular action taken is to make a copy on a disk or other electronic device, the significant percentage of respondents print interesting content, particularly if printing is easy available and not expensive. On the other hand, some participants do not take any action assuming that they can always find the required content again.