| The importance of business information along with the increased accessibility to information via electronic means has made information acquisition and utilization research more important to productivity and competitiveness. This thesis builds on this interest by exploring the following: What factors influence choices between two repositories, the library and the Internet? And does using the Internet improve business information acquisition as compared to using traditional information repositories such as a library?; Based on review of the literature it was hypothesized that perceived repository satisfaction, accessibility, usefulness and performance would predict repository choice. Furthermore, it was hypothesized that there would be no difference in task performance between Library and Internet use. The latter was based in the experimental design which ensured that the tasks could be completed in their entirety using the two different repositories.; A counterbalanced repeated measures experiment was designed to capture perceived repository and task performance measures when using the library, the Internet, and when given a choice of either repository for a competitive intelligence task. Participants were 130 graduate and undergraduate business students at a small, mid-Atlantic, private university. Because of multicollinearity among the predictor variables, two approaches which reduced this statistical bias were employed: (a) the reduced model and (b) factor scores. Based on the results of these two approaches it was found that repository choice was best predicted by library satisfaction and perceived usefulness. Interestingly Internet accessibility was a significant predictor in one approach and not the other. Using ANOVA, significant differences in actual performance and task time were found such that it took longer and there was a decrease in performance in completing the tasks when using the Internet as compared to the library. Ironically, more than half of the participants chose to use the Internet despite the performance results. Research and practical implications are discussed. |
