END‐USERS COMING OF AGE? SIX YEARS OF END‐USER SEARCHING AT THE GUARDIAN

Journalists at The Guardian have had access to online databases for some ten years now and many of them have taken to searching the databases themselves. This paper examines, through the results of a questionnaire survey, why journalists choose to search themselves, what kind of searches they conduct and what problems they experience in carrying out their searches. The survey's major findings are that journalists are generally high‐volume online users (although female journalists lag behind their male colleagues); their searching tends to be of the ‘quick and dirty type’ (probably through lack of training and the pressures of work), though most journalists are reasonably satisfied with the product of their searches; they are not particularly interested in viewing an electronic facsimile of the cutting; and they are generally happy to delegate the online search to the librarians.