English literature students' perspectives on digital resources in a Spanish university

Abstract

Digital resources have been more widely used in the university classroom since the Spring semester of 2020, but the reality is that Covid-19 simply accelerated an already leading tendency in education. The pedagogical potential of teaching with digital resources, editions and collections remains largely unexplored in the Spanish university context, especially in relation to the study of literary and historical texts. This article reports on a case study at the University of Alicante. An online questionnaire was dispensed to 134 English Studies undergraduates at Alicante in order to elicit the students' responses to electronic resources, their knowledge, uses and attitudes towards them. We also attempted to gauge their engagement with the library services at Alicante and beyond. The results indicate a statistically significant preference for electronic over print resources. Nevertheless, they also suggest the students' low degree of awareness of digital resources and their inability to discriminate between digital resources and general Internet sources. A lack of familiarity with the full potential that libraries offer is also reported, which stresses the need for further training in what seems to be a neglected but crucial area of their studies.