Disciplines investigated
To obtain a picture of reading requirements across the academy, data were collected from two different universities, and from a variety of disciplines. One of the institutions was a long-established Australian university offering programs of a more traditional nature; the other was what is characterised as a „new generation‟ university with a focus on more vocationally-oriented programs. Becher‟s (1989) matrix of hard-soft/pure-applied disciplines was used to ensure sampling from a cross-section of disciplines. Becher‟s typology groups academic disciplines on the basis of research methods and attitudes to knowledge. Whilst the disciplines selected in our study fit neatly within the four groupings (see Table 2), it is acknowledged that boundaries between groups may not be as clear-cut as a typology such as this suggests (see also Becher, 1989).