A Preliminary Examination on the Multimedia Information Needs and Web Searches of College Students in Korea

Abstract

Multimedia searching is an important activity on the Web, especially among the younger generation. The purpose of this study aims to examine college students’ multimedia information needs and searching on the Internet. While there is a clear pattern among students with respect to their multimedia uses, searching sources, relevance criteria and searching barriers, some differences exist especially according to searching of different multimedia types such as image, audio and video. For multimedia uses, information/data-focused uses are frequently found in image and video, while the use of audio is mainly for object-focused searches. As multimedia searching sources, audio and video files present a similar pattern of being high in media specific searching sources and low in generic search engines. Browsing through related blogs and homepages is an important part of searching for media files accounting for approximately 20% of total search for each media. The relevance criteria used by study participants when search for image files was primarily concerned with topicality while the contextual and media quality in the audio and video types are also considered important. Searching barriers for audio and video files are categorized into three broad aspects, including access and search quality, preview limitations and collection limitations, while obstacles for image files searching include access difficulties and low qualities of various collection.