University libraries have staged a comeback as information intermediaries.
A three-year study into how users navigate scholarly content reported that nearly 60% of respondents recognised library technology played a role in their navigation 95% of the time.
Having suffered initially from the growth of general purpose search engines, libraries’ online catalogues and web pages are growing in importance as the start point for navigation.
This story could be misleading
THis study primarily focused on faculty doing scholarly research – and I’d imagine most of them were primary users of library resources before the study. It didn’t look at student research behavior at all. Given what I see on the frontlines (or from the admin office) we are still working on gaining prominence with the students.