attitudes toward e-books over time, as well as gather data on current use
and attitudes, while also exploring the impact of new technological developments,
specifically the proliferation of handheld devices. Given the
distributed learning focus of RRU and its library, e-books have always held
important potential for improving access to monographs for our students,
but results from the 2003 survey noted that the majority of RRU students and
faculty had not used e-books (Croft & Bedi, 2005). Also, at that time, the
preference for print over e-book versions of monographs for those who had
used them was close to an even split among students. To give continuity
to the studies, some of the questions from the 2003 survey were used in
the 2009 survey to create points of comparison. Given the increase of freely
available and nonscholarly e-books, comparing students’ use of licensed resources
versus unlicensed resources of a similar nature was of interest in
2009. The increased level of portability afforded to e-books by handheld
devices may significantly influence their current and future use and usefulness,
so some of the survey questions were also geared to gathering data
regarding students’ use of and interest in handheld devices